Hi everyone, my name is Kevin.
Today I want to show you how you can use Google Meet for video conferencing.
Now Google Meet's been available for a little while, especially if you had a G Suite account.
So, if you went to a school or if you worked at a workplace that offered G Suite, you could
have already have taken advantage of Google Meet.
However, Google recently made the decision that Google Meet will be available to everyone.
So, if you're just a normal consumer, you don't go to school or you don't work for a
workplace with G Suite, you can now access Google Meet and you can use it for video conferencing.
So why did Google make that decision?
Well, really two reasons.
Now that so many people are spending all this time at home, video conferencing is just skyrocketing
and the big benefactor of that has been Zoom Video Conferencing.
Now you've had a lot of companies like Google and Facebook that felt a little bit like they'd
been missing out on the action and all these companies now, both Google and Facebook are
rushing out products to make it so people can video conference very easily.
So, Google decided to make Google Meet broadly available.
Facebook's working on Messenger Rooms and getting that out so it's broadly available.
So needless to say, Zoom has a lot of competition coming and companies are hungry to provide
good offerings in this space.
Now secondly, Google has also had Hangouts as a video conferencing product, but they
announced a few years ago that it's going away but it's just kind of hung around very
awkwardly.
And now Google Meet is effectively the replacement for Hangouts where you can have video conferencing,
you can speak with others, you can see others.
So it was about time that Google did this.
Now with Google Meet, what you could do is you could host video conferences with up to
100 people, you could see people on the screen, you could share your screen.
So, it's a very rich video conferencing offering and best of all, it doesn't require any installation
at all.
As long as you're using your browser, you could use Google Meet which is just a really
nice thing.
Well anyway, so enough talk, why don't we jump on the PC, and I'll show you how you
could take advantage and start using Google Meet.
All right, well here I am on my PC and what you're going to do to use Google Meet is you're
going to navigate to the website meet.google.com.
That's the easiest way to get to Google Meet.
And once you're on Google Meet, it's a pretty simple landing page that you'll see here.
You have a few different options that you could do.
The first one is you could just simply start a meeting, or you could join an existing meeting
with a meeting code.
So those are two ways to get into a meeting.
Now you might not want to just start a meeting right now because you probably need to give
people a heads up that the meeting is coming up.
And so, what you can also do over here is you could schedule a video meeting from Google
Calendar.
And I'll show you how to do that in a moment.
But the first thing I want to do is why don't we just jump into a Google Meet meeting.
That's a little awkward to say.
So, let's start a meeting here.
And so, what's happening now is it's starting a meeting and I see myself on my camera right
there.
So, it looks like the camera's working.
Before I joined the meeting, what I could do is I could turn my microphone on or off
by clicking this button, that'll toggle it on and off.
As I hover over, you'll also see that there's a shortcut key to do that, which is Control
D. So, if I press that, that'll also toggle it on and off.
That's something helpful that you could use within a meeting if you just want to say something
quickly, you could hit that shortcut key and then hit it again to mute your microphone
again.
And here too, I could turn my camera off or I could turn it on by toggling this button.
And when I hover over it, you see that there's also a shortcut key for the video camera,
Control E. So, I could turn that both on and off.
And then I also have some other controls here that I could set before I joined the meeting.
Now what I could do is I could just join now, or I could join and present something as soon
as I come in.
But let's just go ahead and I'm going to click on Join Now.
So, let's join this meeting.
And here a very helpful pop-up appears.
It says add others, share this info with people you want in the meeting.
And so here you'll see a URL.
And what I could do is to copy that, I could simply click on Copy Joining Info.
So there if I click on Copy Joining Info, it put it on my clipboard, and I can now paste
that in an email.
I could paste it in a message.
So, it's very easy to get other people included in the meeting.
And here I could even click on Add People and then I could type in names and Google
Meet will take care of adding other people to the meeting.
So, it's very easy to get other people in your meeting.
So, I'm going to go ahead and close that and here I am on the main Meet screen.
So, I have all these different options and we're going to walk through what you could
do here.
So, the first thing that I want to show is we're going to go over and click in the bottom
left-hand corner on Meeting Details.
And here in Meeting Details, once again, I have the Joining Info.
So here I can simply copy that and then I can invite other people to the meeting.
So just one more way to get other people into the meeting.
And what's very interesting and actually I really love how Google did this, but up here
in the top right-hand corner, there's an item called Attachments.
Now, what'll happen is a lot of meetings are set up in a meeting invitation.
So, it says, hey, at two o'clock, join this meeting.
And there might be an attachment saying, hey, we're going to review this document or we're
going to look at this spreadsheet.
Any attachments from your Google Calendar will show up in here.
And a lot of times what'll happen is people will be in a meeting and it's like, hey, look
at that document that I attached to the meeting and then you have to go back to your calendar,
get to the document.
Well, Google just brings them right to the forefront and they show it directly here in
the meeting.
So very, very nice touch in Google Meet.
Now, what I could do is I'm going to go ahead and minimize meeting details and I'm just
going to go across the bottom here and just show some of the capabilities.
So once again, once you're in the meeting, you could also turn your microphone on or
off by toggling that.
This big red phone icon, that's the leave call button.
I'm not going to press that just yet, but that's how you could end your call.
And then here you could also turn your camera off and then you could turn your camera back
on.
So, you have the ability to toggle that on and off.
I'll just go ahead and turn that on.
Now, one of the things that's really neat is over here on the bottom bar, I also have
an option to turn on captions and I'm going to go ahead, let's turn on captions.
This is the test of the captions in Google Meet.
Look at that, it's actually very accurate and it's translating the text that I'm speaking
very, very nicely and very efficiently.
Look at that.
You don't even need someone to type that.
It just listens to me and automatically does it.
I feel bad for event transcribers because they're going to have a bit of competition
with that.
So that's how you turn on captions.
That's kind of nice if you have an audience and perhaps, they don't hear you that well
or maybe they could read better or maybe you have someone who's deaf joining the meeting.
So, kind of a nice capability there.
Over here, you also have the option to present.
And so, I'm going to go ahead, click on present now and you have a few options within this
menu.
I could share my entire screen.
So, let's say I'm jumping between applications.
That's a good option.
If I want to limit it to just one window, I could also just share a window and I could
also share a Chrome browser tab.
Now this is the best.
Let's say I want to share a YouTube video or maybe a video that I have on the cloud
somewhere or an animated something.
I could go ahead and click on this option and then share my screen.
So, I'll just quickly, let me go ahead and I'll share a Chrome tab.
And so here I could select the tabs.
I only have two tabs open, but I could select the tab that I want to share.
And if I'm going to be sharing, let's say a YouTube video, I want to make sure I share
the audio as well from the video.
So that's when you play a video, you want the audio from the video to play.
In that case, I would check this box.
So here I could go ahead, and I'll share my Google Calendar.
And so there my calendar pops up and a good reminder for me, Mother's Day is coming up
on Sunday.
I got to remember to buy flowers.
So here I'm going to go back into the meeting.
And so, some of the things that you'll see here, in Google it says that I'm currently
sharing a tab and I could stop, or I could share this tab instead.
So, a nice way to jump between the different tabs I'm sharing.
Here I once again have the option to stop presenting and I could turn the audio on and
off if let's say I change my mind later on.
Now some of the things that I also want to show while I'm still sharing the screen, if
I click on here, this will show me that what's currently being presented.
So, this is what attendees would see.
So, I'm going to go ahead and deselect that.
And then you could also, if you click on an attendee, you could pin the attendee by clicking
on them.
So here I could click on the presentation to pin that, or I could click on myself to
pin myself.
If I have other people in the meeting, I could also click on them if I want to put the focus
on them.
So, what I'm going to do, let's go ahead and I'm going to stop presenting for now.
But very nice way to share your screen with others.
Now what we're going to do too is let's focus on the top right-hand corner here and I'll
show some of these capabilities.
The first thing I'll click on the people icon.
So here, this will show me all the people who are currently in the meeting here.
So, I could see that.
What I can also do here is if I click on add people, I could add additional people to the
meeting.
And over here on the right-hand side next to people, this is where I can chat with everyone
who's in the meeting.
So, I could just say hi and then everyone will be able to converse over here in the
side panel.
So, I'm going to go ahead and click over and then minimize that view.
Once again, if I click on a person over here, I could pin them to basically spotlight the
view on that individual.
So those are really the kind of the core actions that you could take within Google Meet.
What I also want to show is some of the more advanced functionality.
So, I'm going to go down here on the right-hand side and we're going to click on the ellipses
or the dot dot dot.
It's called more options.
And let's take a look and see what's within here.
So, within more options, some of the things that I could do is I could change the layout.
So, let's see what layouts we have.
Right now, it's set to auto.
So, Google Meet will choose the best layout for me.
But there are a few different layouts.
One of them is the sidebar where you have content.
Then you have speakers on the side.
Or you could spotlight on just the content or just the speaker.
Or you could see up to, I believe it's 16 people at a time in the tiled view.
So, you just see everyone's face at once.
So, kind of a nice way, especially if you have a lot of people within a meeting, you
can see them all at once.
I'm going to click on the dot dot dot again.
You could go full screen.
Once again, you could turn captions on and off.
And then there are also some additional settings.
But there's not too much in here.
This is where you could set your audio.
So what microphone, what speakers.
You could also choose the camera that you want to use.
The resolution that you're sending and receiving at.
And then there are also some general features.
But there's not too much under there.
And that's really kind of the core functionality of Google Meet.
So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to leave the call and I'm going to go back
to the main Meet screen.
So here I am back on the main Meet screen.
And what I want to show is how you can also set up a Google Meet session through your
calendar.
So here I'm going to pull up my calendar.
And today it's Cinco de Mayo.
Let me go ahead and click on here.
And maybe I will have a, let's have a Cinco de Mayo happy hour.
And what I'm going to do is I could invite some guests on here.
And what I could do is as I'm setting up the meeting, there's now an integrated option
that says add Google Meet video conferencing.
So, I'll click on that, and it includes a URL.
And what I do now is as I create this calendar event, so I'm going to go ahead and save it.
When I click into the calendar event, I can now join the Meet.
So, it makes the Google Meeting part of my calendar invitation.
Which is pretty nice when I send that out to people.
I could schedule in advance.
So nicely, Google's done a nice job of integrating Google Meet into their other products.
All right, well that was just a quick look at Google Meet video conferencing.
What's nice is you could join a Google Meet very easily.
You just go to meet.google.com and you could create a meeting, you could join a meeting,
or via your Google Calendar, you could go ahead and schedule a meeting in advance.
Anyway, if this video helped you learn how to use Google Meet and how to video conference
with Google Meet, please give this video a thumbs up.
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All right, well that's all I have for you today.
Hope you enjoyed and hope to see you next time.
Bye.