Google Meet users who logged into their video calls this week were greeted by a couple of new features that improve the collaborative capabilities of the platform. This is just one of the many steps Google has taken to help make their Workspace Platform more desirable in this highly competitive market.
Google Meet users who logged into their video calls this week were greeted by a couple of new features that improve the collaborative capabilities of the platform. This is just one of the many steps Google has taken to help make their Workspace Platform more desirable in this highly competitive market.
Currently 45% of the US workforce continue to work remotely, and over two thirds (⅔) of white-collar employees work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. As such, there has been a ton of attention on collaborative workspace software to support this workforce shift. Microsoft currently dominates the market of office suite software, however Google has chipped away at that market share over the years.
These new features help make the Google Workplace platform more competitive with the offerings from industry leaders like Microsoft and Zoom, but they are far from innovative.
As its name suggests, this feature enables the software to provide transcription/captioning of conversations in real time. We believe this is a huge step for Google Meet as it makes their platform more accessible to all users. However, this feature doesn’t give Google Meet the advantage you might think as Microsoft Teams has had this capability for over a year and offers automatic transcription for 13 languages. Zoom also provides automated captioning for the meetings and webinar platforms, and supports captioning for 12 languages. As of now Google Meet only supports live transcription in 5 languages (English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish). This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction and helps make Meet a more competitive platform in the space but this step is more about catching up to the competition rather than jumping ahead.
Another feature users might be excited to see is the integration of Jamboard and Meet. Jamboard is a collaborative tool that allows teams to work in a “sandbox” environment where they can draw, create notes, highlight, add images, among other things. Jamboard does offer some cool functionality but at its core it is a collaborative whiteboard, something both Zoom and Teams also already offer. So again this is a nice step to help make the Google Workspace environment more cohesive, but is really only bringing their platform up to Teams and Zooms level. This is not to downplay the Google announcements this week. The new APIs and SDK for tools like Meet and Chat could make Google Workplace a much more intriguing option for companies on the fence. However, that is a discussion for another blog post.
These new feature are very well appreciated and help make Google Meet a more competitive option against tools like Zoom and Teams. However, these features are only bringing the product up to its competitors levels and is no’t doing much to set it apart or ahead. That said these features along with Google’s announcement regarding new APIs, integrations and partnerships could make Google Workplace more appealing to businesses.
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