Google has been working hard on its video conferencing tool, Meet, in an effort to compete with other platforms like Zoom.
The company published a roadmap of upcoming features last month, and recently it announced that the rollout for two of these features will be starting this week — but only for certain users.
The two new features would be the polling and Q&A features, which will begin gradually rolling out on October 8, but they won’t be on G Suite Basic, G Suite for Education, or G Suite for Nonprofits customers.
Instead, Google is debuting them to G Suite Essentials, G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, and G Suite Enterprise for Education members first.
Industry watchers say though it is a little disappointing to for Google to exclude some platforms, they are hopeful the new capabilities will come to everyone in time.
Left: Poll results in Meet Right: The Q&A section
Zoom has had these features for a while now, which is one of the reasons it quickly shot to the top of the Play Store at the beginning of quarantine.
Polling will certainly be helpful in educational settings, or even when you just want to see how your friends are feeling in an informal group video chat. The Q&A feature will be great for seminar-style classes and for conferences, workshops, and other similar virtual events.
Google Meet picked up background blurring and new layout options just a few weeks ago, so the dev team is clearly moving fast in order to get these features out to users.
But with the lead Zoom has in video conferencing, will it be enough to make up the momentum? Maybe they just need to add that Meet tab into a few more Google apps.
