Google announced today that it combines two of its video calling apps, Duo and Meet, into one platform. Soon there will only be Google Meet, and Google hopes this may be the calling app users need for just about anything in their lives.
By combining the two, Google hopes to solve some of the problems of modern communication tools. “What was really important was to understand how people choose what tool to use, for what purpose and under what circumstances,” said Javier Soltero, head of Google Workspace. Our digital life is filled with a million different chat apps, each with its own rules and regulations and contact list, some for work and others for personal. Google hopes to be able to use Gmail addresses and phone numbers to bring it all together. “It’s really important and powerful to be able to reach you this way,” says Soltero, “and allow you to decide whether you want to be reached or not, instead of having to manage all these different identities and deal with the consequences. . ”
Soltero preached this idea of ”accessibility” for most of his term at Google, and that’s why Google has integrated Meet and Chat into so many other services. That’s a good goal, but it comes at a price: adding everything to everything has made some of Google’s services cluttered and complex. You can start a meeting from anywhere! But … do you really want to? Optimizing your communication choices is a good idea, but randomly piling them all together doesn’t work.
In the last few years, in particular, Meet has become a powerful platform for meetings and group chats of all kinds, while the Duo has remained more of a messaging app. Google promises to bring all of Duo’s features to Meet in the future and seems confident that it can offer the best of both worlds.
However, it is not entirely correct to say that Duo was killed. The app, which Google initially launched in 2016 as an easy way to conduct one-on-one video calls, does a number of useful things that Meet doesn’t. For one thing, you can call someone directly – including their phone number – instead of relying on sending links or pressing that giant Meet button in your Google Calendar invitation. The duo has always been more like FaceTime than Zoom in that sense. (Google also launched an iMessage competitor, Allo, along with the Duo. Allo didn’t turn out that great.)
The new Google Meet home screen. Image: Google
As the two services become one, Google relies on Duo’s mobile app by default. The Duo app will soon receive an update that brings many Meet features to the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet application will be called “Meet Original” and will eventually be rejected.
This sounds … confusing, but Google says it’s the best way forward. “The Duo mobile app was very sophisticated, especially under the hood,” said Dave Citron, Google’s video product director. “Especially in emerging markets, where network connectivity was sparse or highly variable.” The network is different; Meet is a much more advanced web platform, so it forms the basis of the new combined system. But in both cases, “the idea is 100% functionality,” Citron said, “combined forces and no user left behind.”
This is another effort by Google to bring together some of its previously different parts, making Google’s suite of services more coherent and cohesive. Soltero said that as Meet grew during the pandemic, it had become an obvious place for Google to focus its voice and video efforts in the future. And he hopes that over time, the Meet brand could mean more than just a “meeting.”
For this to work, Google needs to solve very small things about messages and calls
Getting this right will be difficult for Google. If he wants to build a cross-platform, multifunctional audio and video calling platform, he needs to fix a few small things. Should each individual device and browser section you log in to ring every time you receive a call? (Google says no, and it’s getting better to recognize which device you’re actually using and send calls and notifications to it.) Should you be able to receive calls on both your personal and work devices at the same time? (There is still no good answer, but Soltero said he was leading the prosecution to find out.)
Meet is already included in so many Google services that it can become a significant competitor to WhatsApp and FaceTime virtually overnight, but only if it can be integrated without being annoying or complicated.
Add Comment