Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective.<p>Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation.<p>But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with sync issues and phase issues and background noise issues... that&#x27;s hard core.<p>Kudos to the engineering team on this one. This is actually pretty amazing.

Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent.<p>Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they&#x27;re what I use far more often.<p>It&#x27;s too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A&#x2F;V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn&#x27;t ...meet... their needs

GitLab offers a nice course about transitioning to remote work. One of the items in their guidelines about online meeting is not having hybrid meetings. This is, all those attending must attend from their own device rather than the meeting room one (see Jabra) precisely for the reasons this feature tries to address.

I just exited my startup and now work for a much bigger company. I&#x27;m going from a Google-based productivity stack to a Microsoft one, and so far Teams is the worst and best change. Google Meet was fantastic for &quot;just working&quot; especially for less sophisticated meeting guests. The only time Meet didn&#x27;t work is when corporate IT departments at customers actively blocked Meet so their minions used the &quot;approved meeting solution&quot;.<p>As far as Teams vs. Meet, it seems like Teams is great when you are working with people that have climbed it&#x27;s learning curve. Teams is also filled with UX paths where it takes one or two extra clicks (and thoughts) to do simple things like share a file.

I want a simpler feature:<p>Auto-detect people not using headphones, and prevent them from speaking. Until they put some one.<p>Ideally showing them some customisable scolding message.<p>So far, any feedback &#x2F; echo cancellation I&#x27;ve encountered just makes everybody&#x27;s life miserable. Degradation to non-duplex voice (because all except the loudest speaker are attenuated down), &quot;seaside noise&quot; effect&quot;, etc.<p>This is the reason why a phone call over GSM or landline still often &quot;feels&quot; better than any HD video call with people on screens: Low-latency duplex audio.<p>Most* of this goes away if you just wear headphones.<p>Maybe this can be fixed by making the algorithm way more complicated, as the announced feature does. But I&#x27;d be surprised.<p>[*]: &quot;Most&quot;: 2 people with headphones sitting near each other still cause echoes for each other and other participants. Fixing that is truly novel, and needed even for headphone users.

Kudos to Meet team for supporting this! In the video conf world, where most problems are well solved, this is such an amazing feature to differentiate and be customer first!

Sadly this is feature-gated behind Gemini :&#x2F;<p>&gt; Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.

Meet is nice and nicer than Teams and Zoom in my opinion, but for 1-on-1 pair programming I think Facebook Messenger actually has the best experience - when you&#x27;re on the same screen resolution, the screen sharing is 100% zoom (unlike Meet which has padding around the edges), and you can move seamlessly between mobile and desktop (i.e. answer a video call on mobile, the other party sets up screen sharing, and you go to a laptop to continue the call). Too bad I&#x27;m not automatically Facebook friends with all my co-workers!

What if the resulting audio output of the digitally converted human vocalization has an inaudible frequency modulation or signature added to it which operates in a range inaudible to the human ear, you could then detect said signal and filtered out its source or merged &#x2F; manipulated<p>Now fixing search, that would be truly mind blowing.

Do any of the video call services support full duplex audio? It feels so stifling to have to be perfectly silent while others are speaking, compared to the give and take of a normal conversation.

We use google meet internally where i work but i often have to work with external companies using teams, zoom and whatever else. Google Meet just works, all day, everyday for us (barring a fucked up client audio setup...) and this is such a sweet feature we&#x27;ve struggled with, I genuinely look forward to testing this

Another advantage of Meet that it is under U.S. control and law. Zoom out their development team in China. That country actively targets dissidents. It’s easier when those controlling the software are easy for them to control.<p>Better to use Meet than Zoom if the Chinese are in your threat profile or a larger threat.

I&#x27;m surprised no one here has mentioned around.co yet. They&#x27;ve had this feature for years which was the main reason our team has been using it. Good to see other services catching up.

My company has conference rooms that have specialized hardware for Microsoft Teams meetings. The audio really sucks -- everyone must project their voice for people joining online to hear. If someone speaks in a low voice, nothing can be heard on Teams even though it is clear enough for people in the room. I don&#x27;t understand how we haven&#x27;t solved this problem yet.<p>The functionality here seems interesting, but I assume only works well if everyone or almost everyone brings a laptop. It probably won&#x27;t work well for those situations where only one or two people take their laptops to an in-person meeting.

I had the opportunity to try this last month, it worked really well!

But when will Google roll out a stand alone app for meet on Windows and MacOS? It couldn&#x27;t be that hard and it would have better performance then running in the browser.

Meet and Google Docs are perfect Google products.<p>I&#x27;m disapponted when people send me Zoom meetings or want to meet on Slack. Google Meet is a 10x better experience.

I&#x27;ve always thought it would be nice if microphones can be merged when on a phone call with AirPods in. The mics in those headphones are really far away from my face and when it&#x27;s windy talking on them is almost impossible. It would be nice to be able to just talk into the mic on my phone. Then the phone could boost my voice from multiple mics and filter out background noise.

Sounds imprrssive, but also overengineered? Don&#x27;t headphones solve the same problem?<p>Though I guess in a hybrid meeting they&#x27;d make it harder to hear the people in the room. (But you&#x27;d hear them through the laptop, normally? I guess there would be an uncanny delay...)

<i>Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.</i><p>So basically unaffordable for most organisations.

&gt; Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.<p>What does this mean?

Odd. Today I was on a Meet with my girlfriend and her audio kept dropping to silence when she would put the phone down and walk around the kitchen. If she spoke loudly enough it would cut back in. As if it was waiting to recognize voice versus ambient noise.<p>We use Meet a lot, and I&#x27;d never noticed that happening before and wondered if it was due to some setting.

Surround sound from the speakers next :)?<p>I however think (emulated) stereo sound and low latency would do wonders. Sadly this feature here will only introduce latency.<p>Feedback cancellation for external speakers would also be amazing, so you can get rid of your headphones at home. Close up mic and noise gate works, but is fiddly (and no easy noise gate and compressor on linux...)

A bit off-topic but I&#x27;m going to take this opportunity to ask for help. In Zoom, I can share multiple screens&#x2F;windows at once by CMD + Selecting multiple windows. How do I do that in Google Meet. I want to do a presentation and I want to show&#x2F;share two separate screens&#x2F;windows (not monitors) at once.

Maybe the next feature they can work on is allowing multiple people to speak simultaneously

Am I the only one surprised that they keep using this blog style as it was 2005?

This amazing news for my hybrid team. It has always been a struggle figuring out with laptop to use, moving around so you get closer to the mic etc. Hopefully it is as seamless as they portray it here in the blog.

I’ve thought about why you couldn’t do this forever! Amazing technology but I always thought multiple audio input should be able to make a room a better source not worse and full of feedback.

Fantastic idea. This is the first actually useful (as in “step change useful”, not just “here’s another way of browsing your cat photos”) feature I’ve seen from Google in years.

Question: hasn&#x27;t around.co been doing this for years?<p>I remember using that tool in 2022 or so, multiple people in a room with this kind of audio sync &#x2F; cancellation.

If this works externally anywhere close to as well as it worked internally, this is going to be incredibly cool.

does this mean that when a new person joins a meeting that isn&#x27;t on mute by default, we won&#x27;t have to deal with the echos from everybody else in the office while they scramble to find the mute button?<p>because that sounds <i>amazing</i>

If this works, I really hope it comes to both Teams &amp; Zoom as well.

Will this work on Google Workspace Business Starter plans?

Meet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take 100% height&#x2F;width?<p>I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools to make it usable.<p>How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it take to make that change? FFS

Google Meet? They made another one? I can&#x27;t keep up. Is this a replacement for Hangouts? Allo? Duo? This is so confusing.

Do other platforms already provide something similar? While I&#x27;ve been picking up calls mostly in meeting &#x2F; silent rooms (times of gathering around a jabra like a camping bonfire are fortunately gone for now) - some of the users of a platform that I&#x27;ve built (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flat.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flat.social</a>) would occasionally experience the atrocious feedback whistle while being in physical proximity.

I want to be able to customize a route in desktop Google Maps and send it to my phone.

I&#x27;m more interested in cancelling regular feedback from one laptop in the meeting.

It took this many years to get echo cancellation implemented? Many other services had this like a decade ago.

The fact that you can&#x27;t easily go full screen on Meets is bizarre. Makes it a non-starter for pairing. Also, the dedicated app&#x27;s session lasts for like a day which makes it useless, so I&#x27;m stuck having to scroll through my 3 chrome windows and 40 tabs to see where my meets tab is. Although I&#x27;m sure the session timeout is some sort of gsuite configuration

Amazing!<p>I don&#x27;t trust Google with barely anything these days anymore (except Gmail just because it has been so long, and Maps), but Google Meet is the one thing that I prefer Google&#x27;s solution over anyone else&#x27;s.<p>Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp Video, etc.<p>I&#x27;m so glad they are tackling this specific issue. Pretty amazing feat if it works well.