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| The Watsons & The Grandma connected by Meet |
Today, The Grandma has restarted her English course with The Watsons. It has been a great joy seeing them again.
They are fine with full batteries and with their incredible positive attitude to confront difficult situations.
Elisabeth, Raquel, Sònia, Yolanda, Mariana, Elisabeth, Neus, Maria and Judit welcome home again.
The Watsons and The Grandma are going to continue their English course online and they are going to use Google Applications to do it. Today, The Grandma wants to talk about Google Hangout and Google Meet and she also wants to talk about Present Simple.
More information: Present Simple
Google Hangouts is a communication software developed by Google. Originally a feature of Google+, Hangouts became a stand-alone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger and Google Talk into Hangouts.
In 2017, Google began developing Hangouts into a product aimed at enterprise communication. Hangouts is now part of the G Suite line of products and consists of two primary products: Google Meet and Google Chat.
Google has also begun integrating features of Google Voice, its IP telephony product, into Hangouts, stating that Hangouts is designed to be the future of Voice.
Google plans to transition users to Meet and Chat in June 2020, but will continue to support the consumer version of classic Hangouts, raising some speculation in the matter after Google Meet became free.
More information: Present Simple
On March 9, 2017, Google announced that Hangouts would be targeted at business users with the Hangouts brand divided into two products: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.
Meet would focus on video conferences and Hangouts Chat would be focused on instant messaging with additional features such as bot assistant and threaded messaging.
In August 2019, Google announced that the G-Suite version of Hangouts will be replaced by Meet and Chat, and push the shut down to June 2020.
In April 2020, in response to COVID-19, Google Meet became free for all users, raising speculation as to the future of Google Hangouts.
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| Google Meet |
Hangouts allows
conversations between two or more users. The service can be accessed
online through the Gmail or Google+ websites, or through mobile apps
available for Android and iOS, which were distributed as a successor to
their existing Google Talk apps. However, because it uses a proprietary
protocol instead of the XMPP open standard protocol used by Google Talk,
most third-party applications which had access to Google Talk do not
have access to Google+ Hangouts.
Chat histories are saved online, allowing them to be synced between devices. A watermark of a user's avatar is used as a marker to indicate how far they have read into the conversation.
Photos can be shared during conversations, which are automatically uploaded into a private Google+ album. Users can also now use color emoji symbols in their messages.
Google Meet is a video-communication service developed by Google.
It is one of two apps that constitute the replacement for Google
Hangouts, the other being Google Chat. Google planned to begin retiring
Google Hangouts in October 2019.
After being invite-only and quietly releasing an iOS app in February 2017, Google formally launched Meet in March 2017. The service was unveiled as a video conferencing app for up to 30 participants, described as an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts.
At launch, it featured a web app, an Android app, and an iOS app. Features for G Suite users include:
-Up to 100 members per call for G Suite Basic users, up to 150 for G Suite Business users, and up to 250 for G Suite Enterprise users.
-Ability to join meetings from the web or through the Android or iOS app.
-Ability to call into meetings with a dial-in number.
-Password-protected dial-in numbers for G Suite Enterprise edition users.
-Integration with Google Calendar for one-click meeting calls.
-Screen-sharing to present documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.
-Encrypted calls between all users.
-Real-time closed captioning based on speech recognition.
Free users have some further limitations:
-Meetings (after September 2020) are limited to 60 minutes.
-All participants must have a Google account.
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| Google Meet |
While Google Meet
introduced the above features to upgrade the original Hangouts
application, some standard Hangouts features were deprecated, including
viewing attendees and chat simultaneously.
The number of video
feeds allowed at one time was also reduced to 8, while up to 4 feeds can
be shown in a tiles layout, prioritizing those attendees who most
recently used their microphone. Additionally features such as the chat
box were changed to overlay the video feeds, rather than resizing the
latter to fit.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020, Google began offering Meet's advanced features that previously required an enterprise account to anyone using G Suite or G Suite for Education.
The use of Meet grew by a factor of 30 between January and April of 2020, with 100 million users a day accessing Meet, compared to 200 million daily uses for Zoom as of the last week of April 2020.
Until May 2020, a G Suite account was required to initiate and host a Meet video conference, but with increased demand for video conferencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google rolled out free access to Meet also for holders of consumer accounts. Following the announcement, Google's Director of Product Management recommended that consumers use Meet over Hangouts.
More information: Android Central
Free Meet calls can only have a single host and up to 100 participants, compared to the 250-caller limit for G Suite users and the 25-participant limit for Hangouts.
Unlike business calls with Meet, consumer calls are not recorded and stored and the company states that consumer data from Meet will not be used for advertisement targeting. While call data is reportedly not being used for advertising purposes, based on an analysis of Meet's privacy policy, Google reserves the right to collect data on call duration, who is participating, and participants' IP addresses.
Users need a Google account to initiate calls and like G Suite users, anyone with a Google account is able to start a Meet call from within Gmail. Free meet calls have no time limit, but will be limited to 60 minutes starting in September 2020.
For security reasons, hosts can deny entry and remove users during a call. As of April 2020, Google plans to roll out a noise cancelling audio filter and a low-light mode.
More information: CNet
We've arranged a civilization in which
most crucial elements profoundly
depend on science and technology.
Carl Sagan
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