Google Meet is here to Host your Free Video Meetings

Google Meet

I couldn’t have imagined how the world was about to change, when I joined Google last year to lead G Suite. Yet working together took on a whole new significance in a few short months, and meetings became so much more than having things done. From doctor check-up meetings, meetings with financial counselors, meetings for research, exercise meetings, and meetings for birthdays. They may not look like typical meetings, or feel like them, but they are the most important meetings that happen right now.

That’s why we re-engineered Google Meet, which was originally built for secure business meetings, to make it free and accessible to everyone. Since making Meet’s advanced features free for all users of G Suite and G Suite for Education in March, we’ve seen a 30x increase in daily use, with Meet hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings daily. We added approximately 3 million new users per day last month. Therefore we are expanding the offer to more people around the world.

Now that the rollout that we announced two weeks ago is complete, anyone with an email address can sign up for free at meet.google.com and get started. And to make meetings even more open and useful, you will also be able to use Meet directly in Gmail in the coming days.

Select “Start a Meeting” and a new window opens with a special, safe meeting for you to join and share with others. By entering a meeting code, you can easily join meetings shared with you, as well as schedule video meetings and invite others directly from Google Calendar.

Since video meetings have never been more critical, we have been fast-tracking Meet’s most requested features, and are now making them available to all. Anyone can use Meet ‘s easy scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and templates that suit your style like an extended tiled view — all built on Google’s stable, scalable global infrastructure. Speaking from my own experience, Meet’s latest features are already making meetings easier for our team (and for my family). We love how tiled views make us feel more connected — and sometimes unexpected visits from children and pets in the family!

And we’re also looking at ways to make Google Meet more accessible and useful. We know, for instance, that video meetings can be difficult to follow for those with hearing loss, which is why we made sure that AI-powered live captioning was accessible to everyone. One of the most important emails I’ve received was from a parent whose child, thanks to live captioning, might feel more included. Google AI has also allowed you to have useful features such as low-light mode that can automatically change your video to make you more visible to others.

Meet is available on meet.google.com and on iOS or Android for free to anyone. If you have an existing Google Account (for example, if you’re a @gmail.com user), you can log in to get started at meet.google.com. If you don’t have a free Google Account, it takes only one minute to build one using your choice of work or personal email address (we consider this move as a security measure, and you’ll only need to do it once). Or search Meet in Gmail right now.

We hope that Meet will help you interact with all of your important meetings — from work meetings, graduation meetings, wedding meetings, and everything else in between.

Jennifer Thomas
Jennifer Thomas is the Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Cybers Guards. Prior to that, She was responsible for leading its Cyber Security Practice and Cyber Security Operations Center, which provided managed security services.