Continuing its push as a service provider for enterprise, Google has launched a new video conferencing application called Meet by Google Hangouts. The app forms part of Google’s G Suite and is reminiscent of Google hangouts in many, many ways.
Similar to hangouts, Meet is also available as an app and on the web through a URL. If you are a hangout user, you will instantly be struck by the similarity of the two however, instead of the voice call and text chat options available on Hangout’s landing page, Meet merely lets you enter a meeting code or check out the meetings you have scheduled for later.
From what we can gather, the website is aimed towards providing enterprises and businesses with a way to conduct HD meeting without any of the fluff. Someone schedules a meeting (that option seems to be missing at present) and sends everyone who needs to attend it a particular code, they enter the code and voilà. The platform can accommodate meeting with up to 30 participants and is well integrated with the rest of the G Suite including, Gmail and Calender.
Similar to many other services on G Suite, Meet also offers you the ability to join meeting by clicking upon a link. Also, I think that since it is part of the G Suite and intricately connected with other applications, it is quite likely that Google will pull e-mails out of your inbox and give you a list of schedules meetings on the Meeting landing page.
Meanwhile, the search giant hinted at something of the sort when it shut down the Google+ Hangout API, telling developers that it was about to focus on enterprise use case scenarios. Meet looks like the answer to what Google was talking about back then. Meanwhile Google has yet to officially announce the application and what with Duo, Hangouts and now Meet, the company has an overabundance of video capable applications.
Let’s see if the company choses to close Hangouts and replace it with the Duo-Meet combination or if it keeps all three platforms running and catering to their distinct consumer bases.
