- Google has responded to the overwhelming popularity
of Zoom and the nearly universal unpopularity
of Google Hangouts in the online meeting space
by releasing their business class product,
their Google Meet product
which just used to be for paid accounts.
They've released that now to the general public.
So we have three questions, do we not?
First of all, how does Google Meet work?
Secondly, is it any good?
And third, how does it stack up to Zoom?
What say we answer those three questions for you today
on DottoTech.
(upbeat music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck you doing this fine today?
And today, as promised, we're gonna take a look
at Google Meet.
Google's business class, business conference service that,
until recently, was just available
to the paid subscribers of the g-suite product,
but now has been rolled out to the rest of us normal folk.
Now Google is of course releasing this indirect response
to the popularity of Zoom as a video conferencing tool.
So we've got a lot of questions.
First of all, how well does it work?
Is it a good product?
Because frankly, Google Hangouts,
the free service that we used to use in place of Meet
for most of us normal folk, it sucked.
It was a terrible service.
So how good is Google Meet?
How does it work?
How good is it?
Is it worth using?
Is it a viable alternative to Zoom?
Those are the questions that we will have a look at today.
So let us begin.
Now, as is often the case with Google,
there's a couple of different ways
that you can get into using a tool
and we all aren't equal citizens
as far as that's concerned.
As Google rolls out access to Google Meet,
some of us will find a Start A Meet meeting
in our email bar on the side of our Gmail software.
Hasn't happened to me yet,
so I have to do it the old school way.
I have to go to meet.google.com
but there, any of us with a Gmail account,
can start a premium video meeting
now free for everyone.
Amen, let's dive into it and have a look.
So I suppose the best thing to do is just start a meeting.
You can also enter a meeting code here.
If somebody has sent you an invitation,
there will be a very complex code,
almost like a password,
that will allow you to join the meeting.
And they've started right out of the gate
with these complex meeting IDs
to prevent, I guess they would call it Meet bombing
as opposed to Zoom bombing.
But when we go to Start A Meeting,
it will then launch the service for us
and it will check out the resources on your computer
which I have actually found to be a little bit problematic
as I have tested our this service.
When you are in this window here,
you can get everything set up for your meeting.
You can start the meeting right now,
you can start a presentation here.
But for the most part, we should probably check and see
what assets we are using to present our video and audio.
Because I have had some issues with this.
So we go into Settings and in the Settings
you will see your audio settings, your video settings,
and your general settings.
You wanna set up which microphone you wanna use,
and I have several to choose from on my computer.
Which speakers you want to listen to,
and again, I have several on my computer.
And you can test them out here
and make sure that everything is working properly.
Similarly, you wanna check to make sure
that you've chosen the correct camera
if you have multiple cameras set up to your system.
And if you wanna change the resolution,
you can change the resolution.
I would probably leave it at standard definition
for the most part now because of bandwidth issues.
But that's gonna be your choice.
If you've got phenomenal bandwidth where you are,
you might try high definition.
Let's jump in and start a meeting just on our own
before we invite others to join us.
Now when we launch a meeting,
we are given this Copy joining info screen
which is a invite, an hdml link,
a web link that people can click on,
you can set it up by email,
so you can invite people to join your meeting.
Do you remember that code
that I said to answer the meeting code?
That's this little cryptic code here
at the very end of the url.
That's what people can type in to join the meeting.
You could also invite people from your Gmail address book
by clicking Add people here.
So there's a couple of different ways
to add people to your meeting.
And before we're done today,
I will also show you how to use Google Calender
to schedule a meeting in the future.
What I'm showing you right now is
how to start an AdHawk meeting,
where you're just gonna send out an email
or send out a text message to people
and inviting them in right away
and having them join really quickly.
So that's how you invite people into your meeting.
And here we have our video screen,
and as you can see we've got
a fairly stripped down management console.
There's not a lot of places that you can click.
There's nowhere near as many tools
as we have within Zoom.
And to be fair, Meet has less capacity, less capability
than does Zoom.
Here in the top, we see the people who are in our meeting.
There's a basic chat window
that will allow us to go to chat.
And we could also see our own feed
in a thumbnail view up at the top.
Down of the bottom, this is where most of the activity
is gonna take place.
If we go into our more options,
we can change the layout, which I will show you in a moment.
This is useful.
They've just recently added this feature
in response to the very popular Gallery View
which is within Zoom.
You know, that Brady Brunch view
where you have multiple windows of people
always open in the same time.
But you can change your view,
you can change your layout by clicking here,
which will allow a variety of different views.
Now depending on how many people you have in your meeting,
you might have one style of view which you favor.
This is pretty convenient, again, fairly basic
but it does give you the main controls
of having a person automatically
pop up when they're speaking
or being able to view everybody in this tiled view
or a spotlight view,
if you just want one person highlighted
while everybody else is watching,
more like a webinar.
So you've got those options for the views.
We also have in here the ability to go full screen
on your own computer,
so it dominates the entire screen.
And they have other additional settings
that you can go into
which bring you back into your Audio and Video Settings.
And this is actually something that's important, I think.
Because an interesting thing happened to me
and it's done it again here.
Even when I set my speakers to be the speakers
that I normally use for all video conferencing,
which is my display speakers here
that are built into my display audio,
it's defaulted back to the sound card
which is within my mixer.
I don't know why it did this.
It did this several times when I was in the test meeting,
which I will be showing you in a few moments,
with my team.
So if you don't hear the person that you expect to hear
or they can't hear you,
rather than kind of make hand signals and panic,
go down into here.
Go down into the settings
and check that the proper resource has been allocated
for the task.
You have the proper microphone chosen,
you have the proper speakers chosen,
and you have the proper video camera chosen.
Make sure that's all correct.
I guarantee you,
you are going to have issues with this at some point
in your Meet career.
So that's there.
Now the other features that we see here along the bottom
are the ability to turn on captions,
which I will show you in a minute
and is pretty amazing but also kind of scary.
And we also have the ability to present now,
which is the screen sharing options.
This is where we can share our entire computer screen
or one of our windows or a tab within our browser.
Very basic screen sharing included within Google Meet,
nothing too fancy, but it does cover
the bare minimum.
Kind of the minimum viable product of what you need
for a tool like this.
So I think that's pretty much all the options
that we have.
You can hang up on your call,
you can turn on or off or mute your microphone
or camera at this point.
And that's really how it works.
That's pretty much Google Meet.
So let's dive in and take a look at the first meetings
that we did using Google Meet with my team,
as we walk through some of the features
in an actual video conference.
Sadly, we discovered a slight issue
after we recorded this demo
and that is the fact that the audio from my team
doesn't get captured in the video file
as I'm recording the screen cast
for us to demonstrate.
And there is no recording function built into Meet.
So this is gonna have to be kind of a show and tell.
So we started out by looking at the different view options
within Google Meet
and figuring out which layout I like best
for conducting the meeting with my small team.
Then I decided to test out the closed captioning.
You can turn them on in the bottom
and you will see the closed captioning start to flow
from the bottom as we are speaking.
Now you can't hear April and Liz as they're speaking
but you can see the closed caption from them.
When I speak, I will bring up the volume again
and you'll be able to hear what I say
and you'll be able to see the delay
before the closed captioning comes in.
But I have to tell you,
I was very impressed with the quality and the speed
of the closed captioning.
Bearing in mind that I have a very neutral accent.
All of us on this call had a fairy neutral accent.
- [Steve] I bet there will be
some really funny audio auto corrections
as if you were reading it,
it could end up being incredibly rude.
Okay, now I'm recording. (co-workers laughing)
Yes, we did that, we went there.
We tried a variety of different swear words
and I know that many of you, as soon you test this out,
you're gonna see exactly what it is that they blank out
as far as profanities and not.
But here is the thing that caught my attention
as we were testing this out is
I wonder about how much trust we're gonna have
with the fact that Google is now capturing our texts.
Our conversations as text
which then they can later search on.
If we look at the heart of what Google is,
they're all about search.
And this is just now another data type
which they will, in some way, have the ability
to be able to crawl through and determine
our preferences, determine what we like,
to basically farm information from us
as we go along.
But having said that, the technical capabilities
of being able to add closed captioning on the fly
to a meeting,
very, very impressive.
I went on to test out screen sharing
which is pretty much identical to what you would find
in any other application.
And there's not really much more to show
as far the features within Google Meet.
Now as it is a business meeting tool,
being able to schedule a meeting is a really important part
of using any of these tools.
And as I promised you at the beginning of today's video,
I will show you how you schedule a meeting
even if you don't see the meeting app in your Gmail
at this point.
Meetings can be created within Google Calender.
I'm gonna just open and create a new calender invite here,
or a new calender item and appointment.
And when I create a brand new appointment
in Google Calender,
if I look over here on the side,
I have the ability to add Google Meet video conferencing.
So I'm gonna add a guest here, I'm just gonna add Liz
to this meeting and invite her into this meeting tomorrow
and now when I click on here, it generates a code
that will allow up to 100 participants
to join the meeting.
And when this invite is sent out
to anybody on this distribution list,
they will be invited into the meeting
and we will see the meeting as a line item
in the calender invite as well.
So everybody will get the login information automatically.
This is actually pretty slick,
I would say this is as slick as it gets
as far as adding conferencing into Google Calender.
That is really where we have to stop the comparison
between Meet and Zoom
because we have looked at all of the features
that are built into Meet
and we can now compare them to Zoom.
You have to recognize that Zoom has lots of features
that we haven't compared to Meet
because Zoom is a more capable tool.
So I'm going to now cut to the chase.
I'm gonna give you my final summery.
Is Google Meet the equal of Zoom?
No, it's not as good an application.
But can you use Google Meet and be just as productive
as using Zoom?
Yes, I think you can.
If you have basic needs as far as meeting requirements goes,
Google Meet can do and host a great meeting for you.
Both of the products are free
and offer good free service.
Both of the products are relatively easy to use.
If you live in the Google ecosystem,
both the products integrate well.
And if you live in the Microsoft ecosystem,
both of the products integrate well as well
as with the Apple system.
So they're equal players as far as all of that is concerned.
As far as the quality of the meeting,
Zoom has an edge.
But Zoom requires you to download an app
which I believe delivers a higher quality feed.
The benefit of Google Meet is it's browser based.
And since it's coming from Google,
it's in the chrome browser,
it might have some advantages there.
But overall, my sense is the quality of Zoom Meetings
is a higher video and audio quality
than is the quality of Google Meet meetings.
But it's not a deal breaker
because the Google Meet meetings, as you saw,
are perfectly usable.
They were good as far as the quality's concerned.
Now as far as security and privacy goes,
I believe that they're pretty equal
as far as what they're offering.
But this will be a point of contention.
And I know we will see lots of comments
of people who are in the anti-Zoom camp
and they think Zoom is a real security risk
to anybody living in North America.
And that is your opinion and you're certainly welcome to it,
and I know you will be sharing it with us in comments.
And I love to see those comments.
But recognize that there's an equal number of people,
and we will probably see an equal number of comments
of people concerned with trusting Google.
You are trusting one company or the other.
And neither one of them, as far as I'm concerned,
has shown that they are exemplary as far
as earning our trust.
So you're basically dancing with one devil
or dancing with the other devil
by using either of these free services.
App versus app, as far as mobilities concerned,
they're pretty much of a muchness.
They are very, very equal.
And let's talk about support for a moment, shall we?
And as far as I'm concerned,
Google's support is non-existent.
And as far as most of you are concerned,
from what I'm reading in the comments,
the free version of Zoom,
the support is pretty much the equal of Google support.
The free version, it's pretty much non-existent.
Although the paid users in both platforms
can expect a certain level of support.
But don't expect exemplary support
from either of these providers.
Google is playing catch up with their services
so we should be seeing additional features
rolling out in Meet over time.
And a lot of the shortcomings
that I've talked about within this video
probably will be addressed over time.
But they've got a long way to go
to catch up to the features and benefits
and just the mature product that is Zoom.
That's it.
I hope that you found the video today to be useful.
I am really looking forward to the comments
and sharing that you have.
And reading the comments that you share with me
will inform me to help me produce more videos
in the future for you.
So let me know what you want to see.
Now if you have found this valuable,
I have a couple of favors to ask.
First of all, please give us a like
and share this video with others
who need to learn more about this topic.
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Click that subscribe button,
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and I will see you next time here on DottoTech.
Until then, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming a castle.