Technically very impressive, and meets a real need. My office is still running telecom hardware from a decade ago, all the wireless mics have dead batteries, and is reluctant to replace since so many meetings are completely virtual, so why have custom in office hardware.

This essentially replaces that expensive proprietary hardware with a matrix of laptops, and essentially every user gets a mic.

But it only works on laptops right, not phones?

Do you think they are using some kind of inaudible-to-humans signal to coordinate this or is the unmodified audio good enough?

I too am in awe of the audio engineering challenges and opportunities here.

But I don't necessarily know that Meet is trying to tackle all this? Are they using the mics as a microphone array & processing signals across phases? Could be missing it but I don't see that they said so. Perhaps they're just picking the loudest mic for a given speaker? Or any of a dozen other simpler tactics?

In a large room, perfect syncing is actually impossible since different listeners will be far enough from each other speakers to cause, at best, comb filtering, and at worst, audible delays.

Also imagine that 44.1kHz on one laptop will not equal 44.1kHz on another or one can run at 96kHz and others on 44.1kHz etc. that means everything has to be dynamically resampled in realtime whilst preserving quality and low latency.

I think this is much simpler than what you're suggesting. Careful microphone level management can handle this. No need for audio sync. I know they use the word "sync" but that's a very broad term.

I assume it's just some neural network doing the heavy lifting, or not?

If you were doing this kind of multipath and array signal processing on RF signals, it would be covered by ITAR.

And yet Google can ship it anywhere on the planet via HTTPS and webasm... Things that make you go hmm.

From the praise, I assume you have first hand experience with it ? Which part did you use and did you see any rough edges ?

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I agree that this is amazing - but what I don't like about it, is the fact that a 3rd party is doing this, when it should really be a built-in feature of the operating system - or at least, be implemented as close to the device as possible. From what I can glean from this breathless press release, this functionality requires a fair bit of cloud ... anathema to audio professionals, but maybe not so, the professional management classes.

Too many times these kinds of services are wrapped up at the application layer, where really they belong in the operating system. For example, wouldn't this be a perfect thing to implement as a plugin for Pulseaudio, or JACK, or even .. VST?

(Disclaimer: I work on high end microphone and audio products at a well-known hardware manufacturer of such, where much more effort is being made to make the devices, themselves, smarter ..)

Meet frustrates me immensely because I can't just fullscreen someone sharing an HD screen onto my HD screen and get 1:1 pixels with an overlay of faces (like Zoom does). Instead, I have to either not be able to read small text, or awkwardly pan in the recently-added "zoom" view.

Meet's GUI eats screen space and reduces the size of video feeds as a result with not being able to do anything about it. It took years for it to let you choose audio and video sources from the button itself like zoom has had forever and forced you to go into the setting panels and tap on 4 screens. Same with video feed layouts. I really dislike meet compared to zoom.

Zoom also transmits much higher quality video and screen share feeds than meet does.

This new feature is very impressive although, most echo cancellation is "mute everyone except one speaker" which leads to walkie-talkie style half-duplex talking, which really hurts normal communication flows. I wonder how they do it here.

It very rarely matters which product is "better" in any objective sense. If you are team that work with Teams, your meetings will be on teams. Teams could be much worse than Zoom or Meet, you wouldn't move your group from Teams for one meeting anyway.

I used many video conferencing systems over the years and I meet is my favourite

usually there is need to some third party extension/application that have usually does not support Linux

or if Linux is supported, they explicitly ban Wayland/pipewire (I'm looking at you slack)

but for need they stick to web standards therefore this works in any web browser you might have

also it tends to not consume every CPU cycle you have (slack again) so you can do so something while you eg screen sharing

My Meet calls always end up pixelated, where Zoom looks perfect. That’s basically the only thing I care about after the audio quality, I often cannot read someone’s screen when shared via Meet. Zoom also feels lower latency but I never checked if that’s the case.

Note sure if that’s because I’m not in the US.

Agree, I find Meet is the simplest and works the best. I really appreciate the audio filtering -- don't ever hear colleague's typing or dogs barking or lawn mowing.

The organisation I worked at used Meet until someone from Microsoft convinced them to use Teams.

Such a nightmare. Quality of meetings went downhill and employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc meetings.

If Meet did "autorecord" combined with "autoshare recording with recipients" (specifically including Google Group recipients)... then it would be perfect.

As it is, we're gradually shifting more things to Zoom where that's either part basic functionality, or part easy to automate as things like Zapier are well integrated into the API.

We only use Meet for team meetings now, and we did use Gong.io to solve the above... but Gong is pretty expensive just to allow those who were out that week to catch up on a recording when they're back and if they care to.

I have always had way more issues with meet than zoom. Guessing it is something about browser compatibility but participants regularly have issues with mics and cameras that I don’t see with zoom.

With Meet, time from opening the meeting link to joining the meeting is often <1 sec, whereas others (especially Teams) have painfully slow loading screens.

Meet is perfect, I’ve always loved it. Slick and not bulky. Works beautifully in the browser. Simple features that work seamlessly. The ability to share single chrome tabs is a godsend. Zoom has always felt like a clunky product to me.

As an "IT admin", it's not that I need convincing. It's that the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour and support is non-existent.

This isn't an area where simplicity wins. Zoom is targeted more towards professional use whereas Meet is more for casual or social use. It doesn't really support multiple displays, like I can't watch screen sharing on one display while moving the chat and video windows off to another display. Scaling options for screen sharing are inadequate and it doesn't even support real full screen display. Meet lacks advanced audio options that make it unusable for things like music lessons. Zoom has more third party integrations available.

Meet requires a Google account to attend a video call while Zoom does not. So if your hosting a meeting with strangers, using Meet is not user friendly.

At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist

What aspects of Zoom and Teams are frustrating for you?

the free version has pretty low bitrate as far as I can tell

Agree that Meet is the superior experience.

Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time until one their VPs decides to "improve it" with the usual imbecile ideas they come up with.

>Google Meet now scans all your files so they can get shared automatically with all members on the meeting when it is appropriate to enrich the conversation. You cannot opt-out this feature.

Meet’s default audio noise cancellation is pathetic compared to Zoom. Initial Teams was also poor but has improved.

My daughter’s school uses Zoom for her IEP where at least one attendee is remote that day. Not a fun experience.

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It gets complicated when half a team is in the office taking the same call from their desks, easier for Gitlab because they are full remote

Rules are meant to be broken. I've participated in many meetings where, for one reason or another, some participants couldn't join in person. Making it easier - for them and for us - is a technical challenge, and not something to be decided by an arbitrary rule.

It's optimizing for the lowest common denominator. When a majority of the team is present in office, it's silly to downgrade the experience for everyone.

… no? No! That's terrible advice.

The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.

Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.

I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.

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> As far as Teams vs. Meet, it seems like Teams is great when you are working with people that have climbed it's learning curve.

Can you give one example?

And then there's another nag prompt if bluetooth headphones/mic are detected. The latency on those things can get horrendous, up to like 300 ms.

The thing though is that it's entirely possible to have a setup with loud monitoring (e.g. performers on stage with floor wedges to hear the music and themselves) using speakers. It works well with directional dynamics and stage condensers close to your mouth, but fails horribly with the omni ECMs on your laptop/webcam several feet away.

I love my WFH setup with a dynamic right in front of my mouth and have the system properly rung out so I can monitor myself with no feedback. The cartoid pattern greatly reduces the sound coming from the off-axis speakers and the noise gate takes care of the rest. Obviously this isn't for everyone though and good luck having something this in the office unless you have a room with a door.

Not if you pay attention to that last one:

> and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on

This might actually be using a decent amount of data center processing to handle the merged audio performantly.

If that's the case, it could make sense that it belongs to a higher tier.

I'm not that deep into Google latest rebrand activity... how is Google Meet related to LLM model? or do they call many unrelated things Gemini?

You can convince your company to switch to Workplace, a corporate version of Facebook.

What search? Some search within Meets? Or are you talking about Google Search in general, in which case I don't think the Meets team has much to do with that.

Yes, all of them. Wear headphones.

Pretty sure literally all of them do, but generally only full duplex.

Not triplex or quadruplex etc.

In other words, if you're having a 1-1 video call, both of you have your audio working at all times.

But as you go to 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 participants, it generally continues to be just max 2 simultaneous audio streams, determined by whoever has been the loudest recently.

Unless you turn on special features like music mode etc.

This is a feature, not a bug, because otherwise background noise and sounds would start adding up to become intolerable. (Why we usually try to intentionally stay on mute anyways, so we don't accidentally become even just that second audio stream.)

I feel like Zoom does the best job of the corporate offerings. Google Meet feels like the worst and most stifling.

I was talking to someone who specialises in corporate communication at a conference last week and she confirmed my feeling above as well. Her thing is “talking over each other is a key part of human interaction and forcing one at a time is stifling and unnatural”

just came by to see if anybody mentioned around.co

super cool tech, but was hard to convince my org to use it over Zoom/Meet

What makes you think it'll have better performance if it was rewritten as a native app? All the underlying code that handles audio and network communication is already built using fast C++/Rust code. This includes things like WebRTC, audio and video capture, compression, the WebAudio API, etc.

In products like Meet, JavaScript just acts as a glue language that sticks all these APIs together. All the heavy lifting is actually done by the browser, and modern browsers are some of the most efficient language runtimes humanity has ever built.

Don’t they already have it? It’s called Chrome.

Unless you need legible screen dharing of a code editor in my experience. Zoom is awful in many ways but blows Meet out of the water for our needs.

I love meet because of how well it’s integrated with google cal

The killer Slack feature is the ability to draw on the other end's screen. I really wish I had that sometimes in (small) Google Meet meetings, simply to avoid the "it's on your left. Your other left. Okay down 3 items. That was four items. Go up one. No, now you've gone up 2 items…"

Or mid-prod outage trying to get some engineer to type a command to run for you, and they can't dictate from speech to terminal, because they don't know shell/Unix commands at all. Then I can just write the command on their screen, for them to copy character by character… (to some extent, chat solves this. To some extent. I also wish we could get some basic markdown.)

Docs has a few big shortcomings in my experience. Like it can’t number headings and figures, and cross-reference to them.

Is it possible to use Google Meet without telling Google your phone number?

I know that it's possible to use Zoom and Teams anonymously. But for Google Meet, I assume providing a (verified) phone number is required.

I think you miss-understood the feature. It fixes the issue where there's multiple people in a room joining the same meeting from their laptops while sitting next to each other. It basically combines all microphones / speakers in that room into one big speaker / microphone just like a fancy conference setup.

No because your voice is not constrained to headphones.

Who's wearing headphones in a meeting? Good luck trying to get people to do that.

I think in most VC software (including Meet) there is a threshold you have to be above, or it's considered just background noise, and not transmitted.

In Discord, you can actually view your audio in reference to the threshold, which helps get that setting set appropriately for the hardware you have. No such luck for the "real" VC apps though.

Blogger is basically abandonware.

Are you using firefox? I use this extension called Stylus that lets you write custom css for pages and automatically apply it when you visit the page. There's probably something similar for chromium browsers

It takes just one misguided product manager. It's easy at Google for one misguided product manager to derail a dozen engineers' work.

Literally another one: one of the things Google Meet replaces... is Google Meet (original) from 2017.

Not sure if this would solve your problem, but have you tried companion mode?

Do you mean audio feedback, or just one user that complains a lot?

No.

Meet has had echo cancellation from the start.

This is multi-device adaptive audio merging, as the title says. Completely different, and far far more impressive.

> Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp Video, etc.

So much better? Does Meet have instruments for whiteboarding or on-screen annotation?