Google introduced today that it’s combining its video-calling apps, Duo and Meet, into a single platform. More quickly, there can be only Google Meet, and Google’s hoping it can be the one calling app customers want for just about the entirety of their lives.
by bringing them each collectively, Google’s hoping it could resolve several what ails modern conversation equipment. “What’s been important is knowing how people make the selection as to what device they’re going to use, for what purpose, in what circumstance,” says Javier Soltero, the top of Google Workspace. Our virtual lives are full of one million different chat apps, with their regulations and norms, and make contact with listing, some for work functions and some for non-public ones. Google’s hoping it can use Gmail addresses and get in touch with numbers to deliver all that collectively.
Soltero has been preaching this idea of “reachability” for the maximum of his tenure at Google, and it has led Google to combine Meet and Chat into so a lot of its other services. It’s a very good intention, but it comes at a cost: including the entirety of everything has made several of Google’s offerings cluttered and complex. Streamlining your communication alternatives is a great idea, but haphazardly cramming the entirety collectively doesn’t work.
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During the last couple of years, in particular, Meet has become a powerful platform for conferences and group chats of all kinds, whilst Duo has stayed extra of a messaging app. Google guarantees it’s bringing all of Duo’s capabilities to meet going forward and appears satisfied it may offer the excellent of each world.
It’s no longer quite proper to say that Duo’s being killed, even though. The app, which Google originally released in 2016 as a smooth way to make one-to-one video calls, does some of the useful things that Meet doesn’t. For one component, you can name a person without delay — which includes their smartphone number — in place of counting on sending links or hitting that large Meet button on your Google Calendar invite. Duo has always been more like FaceTime than Zoom in that feel.
As the two services end up one, Google is leaning on Duo’s mobile app as the default. Quite quickly, the Duo app gets an update that brings an onslaught of Meet functions into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The modern Meet app might be known as “Meet authentic,” and finally deprecated.
This is but another effort from Google to unify a number of its previously disparate elements, making the Google suite of offerings make more coherent and cohesive sense. Soltero said that as Meet has grown at some point during the pandemic, it became a clear place for Google to concentrate its voice and video efforts going ahead.
