Google Meet is an accessible and easy-to-use virtual meeting platform for casual users and Workspace customers, hosting everything from team check-ins to large presentations and town halls. It plays nice with everything else in the Google ecosystem, so if you or your employer are locked in, it’s likely a top choice for video conferencing. Here are 10 hacks to get the most out of Google Meet.
Use meet.new to quickly launch an unscheduled meeting
If you need to start a video call at a moment’s notice, you can open Google Meet and hit New meeting > Start an instant meeting—or you can simply type meet.new into your browser. This link automatically launches a meeting; no additional clicks needed. From here, you’ll see a pop-up window with the option to send invites or copy the meeting link to share.
Enable captions and translation on live calls so you can turn off audio
If you forgot your headphones or need to mute your meeting audio for any reason, you can turn on accessibility features to read captions instead. For live captions in the same language, simply tap the Turn on captions button at the bottom of the meeting to launch subtitles. If you’re on a call in which another language is being spoken, you can use translated captions from dozens of languages. Go to More options > Settings > Captions, select Language of the meeting, and toggle Translated captions on. Then select the language you want captions translated to. While live captions are a standard Google Meet feature (also available in many languages), translation is currently limited to select Business and Enterprise Workspace editions.
Turn on noise cancellation to hide that you’re in a public location
If you’re joining a virtual meeting from a coffee shop, bar, or other location that isn’t your home office or co-working space, you probably don’t want the ambient environment to be obvious or distracting. In addition to blurring or adding a virtual background, you can turn on noise cancellation to filter out anything that isn’t speech, like typing or room echoes. This five-year-old demo shows the feature working, albeit with some distortion of speech.
Before a meeting, you’ll see this option in Settings. To turn it on once you’re in a meeting, go to More options > Settings > Audio and turn on Noise cancellation. (The process is similar across desktop, Android, and iOS.) Device-based noise cancellation is available to all Android users, while cloud-based noise cancellation works on mobile and desktop for those on specific Google Workspace plans.
Use picture-in-picture to multitask during meetings without giving yourself away
When you’re multitasking during a virtual meeting—and not looking at your camera—you don’t want it to be obvious. If you are using Google Meet in Chrome, picture-in-picture will overlay your video onto any other tab, window, or app you navigate to, so it seems like you’re engaged. You can set picture-in-picture to trigger automatically when you switch tabs during a meeting. To grant this permission, hover over the URL and click View site information on the left, then toggle Automatic picture-in-picture on. Or, you can enable it as needed during a meeting under More options > Open picture-in-picture. You can then move or resize the UI to your liking.
Use companion mode or merged audio so you can join on multiple devices in the same room
With hybrid teams, you may have users calling in from their own devices, while others share one conference camera in an office. In that situation, those who are in person aren’t able to chat, react, respond to polls, annotate, or otherwise engage in the call in the same way. Google Meet has an adaptive audio feature that allows everyone in the room to join under their own account (without headphones) to allow for in-person conversation, by merging mic and speaker feeds to prevent echoing and feedback. Audio is merged automatically when two or more nearby devices are signed into the same meeting, though you may be asked to confirm manually. To disable merged audio, go to Menu > Stop merging your audio. An alternative is companion mode, which allows attendees to join on their own devices to facilitate participation, which are then paired to meeting room hardware running the audio and video. This feature is available to Google Workspace users.
Use Google Slides to invite people to present with you
It makes sense that Google wants you to use its apps across the board, which is why Slides is integrated directly into Meet. You can screen share content from PowerPoint or Canva instead, but there are some good reasons to build your deck in Slides if Meet is your conferencing platform (and you have an eligible Workspace account). First, it solves the most frustrating part of virtual presentations: being able to see your slides, participants, and chat all in the same interface. You can also add co-presenters, so multiple people can control slides that the main presenter shares. As such, you won’t have to switch screen sharing between presenters or ask the person who initially shared to move to the next slide. To use this feature, hover over the presentation title, click Add a co-presenter, and check the box next to one or more participants. Slides also allows live annotation for real-time collaboration.
What do you think so far?
Set up polls for live feedback during meetings
Meeting chats can be unwieldy for engaging participants and collecting feedback, especially if there are hundreds of attendees. Instead, use Meet’s polls feature, which prompts participants to vote on responses. This can be used for icebreaker questions at the beginning of a call, to coordinate upcoming meeting times, to solicit input on future topics, or to get a scaled rating of a presentation. Meeting moderators can create pools under Meeting tools > Polls > Start a poll. Type in the prompt and responses, then click Launch (or Save if you want to use it later in the meeting). You can allow participants to vote anonymously with the Responses appear without names toggle.
Turn on attendance tracking and use it to send follow-ups
Taking attendance in a virtual meeting can be essential for ensuring that participants who are required to be there actually show up, but it can also be useful for knowing who to follow up with afterward. If your call has hundreds of people, you don’t want to count or note each individual in the participant list. Instead, you can get a Google Sheets attendance report with names, emails, and how long attendees were present. You can easily translate this into a mailing list for action items, marketing material, or thank you notes. To enable the feature in a meeting, go to Host controls and toggle Attendance tracking on. This feature is available on most Workspace accounts.
Turn on gesture detection to simulate an in-person class or meeting
In a typical virtual meeting, participants use a “Raise Hand” button to get in line to speak. But if Google Meet’s gesture detection feature is enabled, you can raise your hand by literally raising your hand. This can make your class or meeting feel a little more natural—though, of course, chaos may ensue if students or attendees use gesture detection just for fun. Hosts can turn on gesture detection in live meetings under More options > Settings > Reactions. A few things to be aware of with this feature, though: It only works when one hand is visible and raised away from your face and body, and it’s disabled if you’re actively speaking. You can’t lower a hand with a gesture, either; instead, you’ll click the Hand raise button. Gesture detection is available for users with Workspace, Business, and Enterprise accounts, as well as Teaching and Learning Upgrade customers.
Use “take notes for me” to create a searchable archive of meeting summaries
Google Workspace users have access to various Gemini features in Meet, including “take notes for me,” which automatically captures and summarizes meeting notes in a Google Doc. After the call ends, the document is saved in the organizer’s Drive and attached to the Google Calendar event for attendees to reference. This makes meeting summaries easily searchable, so you can quickly find notes of what was discussed and during which call. As the organizer, you can enable this feature before the meeting and via the calendar invite, or you can turn it on once you join by tapping the Take notes for me Gemini icon at the top-right of your screen and selecting Start taking notes.
