Google to bring Meet videos into Docs

Google announced its latest round of updates to its productivity and collaboration platform Workspace, including expanded encryption options for Google Meet videos. Google is bringing optional end-to-end encryption for Google Meet meetings to all Google Workspace customers.

Google is also looking to let its customers directly integrate Meet videos into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, letting users see their collaborators, plus the documents they're collaborating on -- all under one tab.

Some of the new Google Meet features mimic features included on other video conferencing platforms like Zoom. From next month, attendees will be able to react in meetings with emojis like a thumbs-up or heart emoji. Meet next month will also offer picture-in-picture capabilities for users running Chrome browsers. They'll be able to see up to four video tiles of meeting attendees in a floating window on top of other applications.

Google also announced improvements to Meet's live streaming features. Currently, Google Meet users can host meetings of up to 500 active attendees with the ability to livestream to audiences of up to 100,000 across trusted Google Workspace domains. Coming later this year, livestream attendees will be able to participate in Q&A and polls. Additionally, Google will enable meeting hosts to stream meetings directly to YouTube from the Meet activities tab.

Google is also adding improvements to Spaces, the Workplace tool introduced last year. Spaces will offer inline threading in the coming weeks. Google is also making Spaces more sharable and discoverable. Later this year, the company will enable users to search and join Spaces across an organization. Google is also increasing the team size limits of Spaces from 400 to 8,000 to 25,000 by the end of this year.