Google Meet adds AI-powered noise cancellation, rolling out now

Google’s Meet has seen massive adoption rates like other teleconferencing services as so many of us are working from home.

Google Meet Stories

Google has been working on this feature for over three years when it acquired Lime Audio, and now that acquisition is going to pay off.

“It started off as a project from our conference rooms,” Serge Lachapelle, G Suite director of product management told Venturebeat. “I’m based out of Stockholm. When we meet with the U.S., it’s usually around this time [morning in the U.S., evening in Europe]. You’ll hear a lot of cling, cling, cling and weird little noises of people eating their breakfast or eating their dinners or taking late meetings at home and kids screaming and all. It was really that that triggered off this project about a year and a half ago.”

Google Meet is free for everyone with a Google account. Google says that the service will only be free until September 30th and the meeting duration is limited to 60 minutes.

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Recently added features

Google has been adding new and improved features to better compete with rivals Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack. Google currently has 100 million daily users but is still trailing Zoom with its 300 million daily users. A list of new features added to Google Meet:

Tiled layout for larger calls: The expanded tiled layout now let’s web users simultaneously see up to 16 participants at once (previously, tiled layouts only enabled you to see four people at a time). More updates are coming for larger meetings, better presentation layouts, and support across more devices.

Low-light mode: Meet can now use AI to automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to other participants in sub-optimal lighting conditions. This feature is currently rolling out to mobile users, and will be available to web users in the future. 

Noise cancellation: To help limit interruptions to your meeting, Meet can now intelligently filter out background distractions—like your dog barking or keystrokes as you take meeting notes. Noise cancellation will begin rolling out in the coming weeks to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers starting with web users and later to mobile users.