Google Meet will soon be enriched with a host of new features. The application will even be able to automatically transcribe discussions during meetings into text. Convenient for making reports without writing anything down!
Each year, the Google Cloud Next conference is an opportunity for the Internet giant to present its innovations and new partnerships. During the 2022 edition, Google announced many additions for its suite of Workspace tools, and more specifically for Google Meet. It must be said that the videoconferencing platform has experienced rapid growth with Covid-19 and the democratization of telework, which pushes the firm to constantly add new functions – it is necessary to remain competitive against Zoom and Microsoft Teams. In June, it even merged Duo and Meet to clarify its offer and, above all, simplify video calls with a single solution. Over the next few months, a host of small improvements will therefore be added, including one major one: the automatic transcription of meetings on Google Docs.
Google Meet: conversations transformed into text
Transcribing a meeting – whether to provide a report to absentees and collaborators, or simply to keep track of it – is always a tedious task, including in videoconferencing. Even if the Google Meet application allows you to record video calls, you still have to transcribe everything by hand – or rather on the keyboard. In short, it is far from being the fastest and most ergonomic solution. That’s why, over the next few months, Google Meet will integrate a new function to transcribe everything that is said directly into Google Docs. The option will be enabled by default, and when the meeting starts, attendees will see a notification that meeting transcripts are active. Upon completion, the record will be saved to the host’s “Meeting Recordings” folder in Google Drive. For sessions with 200 participants or less, the link to the transcribed document will be emailed to the organizer, panelists and those who initiated the transcription. If there are more than 200 participants, the link will be sent to everyone, as reported the Hindustan Times. This function will be available in English during the week, but it will be necessary to wait until 2023 for French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. This should save time and ensure that no one misses important information mentioned during the session.
Other functions will also be included. Thus, from October 2022, Google Meet will be able to crop videos by automatically centering each participant in their video window. To make discussions more user-friendly, the application will place the speaker’s video directly in the slides of Google Slides by the end of the year. Finally, a companion mode will be incorporated into the mobile application at the beginning of 2023. It will allow users in a conference via a computer to use their smartphone as a secondary screen, to request the floor or chat in the meeting chat, for example.