Here's how we built adaptive audio in Meet, which transforms multiple laptops in close proximity into a unified audio system so you can create ad-hoc meeting spaces IRL.
An updated calling experience and new features in Google Meet make connecting with friends and family more fun.
Android 14 QPR2 brings exciting advancements in user privacy and streamlined multitasking with app screen sharing. No longer do users have to broadcast their entire screen while screen sharing or casting, ensuring they share exactly what they want to share.
Leverage the new MediaProjection APIs to customize the screen sharing experience and deliver even greater utility to your users.
Prior to Android 14, users could only share or record their entire screen on Android devices, which could expose private information in other apps or notifications.
App screen sharing is a new platform feature that lets users restrict sharing and recording to a single app window, mitigating the risk of oversharing private messages or notifications. With app screen sharing, the status bar, navigation bar, notifications, and other system UI elements are excluded from the shared display. Only the content of the selected app is shared.
This not only enhances security for screen sharing, but also enables new use cases on large screens. Users can improve multitasking productivity – such as screen sharing while attending a meeting – by taking advantage of extra screen space on these larger devices.
There are three different entry points for users to start app screen sharing:
Let’s consider an example where a host user wants to share a single app to the participants of a video call.
The host user starts screen sharing as usual, but now in Android 14 they are presented with an updated dialog that allows them to choose whether to share a single app instead of their entire screen.
The host user decides to share a single app, and they select the app from the App Selector.
During screen sharing, the video call participants can see only the content from the selected app.
The host user can end the screen capture in a few ways: from the app where sharing started, in the notification shade, by closing the app being shared, or by ending the video call.
Apps that use the MediaProjection APIs are capable of starting app screen sharing without any code changes. However, it’s important to test your app to ensure that the screen sharing experience works as intended, since the user flow changes with this new behavior. Previously, the user would stay in the host app after the permission dialog. With app screen sharing the user is not returned to the host app, but the target app to be shared is launched instead. If the target app was already running in foreground (e.g. in multi window mode), then it simply becomes the top focused app.
Android 14 also introduces two callback methods to empower you to customize the sharing experience:
MediaProjection.Callback#onCapturedContentResize(width, height) is invoked immediately after capture begins or when the size of the captured region changes. The method arguments provide the accurate sizing for the streamed capture.
Note: The given width and height correspond to the same width and height that would be returned from android.view.WindowMetrics#getBounds() of the captured region.
If the recorded content has a different aspect ratio from either the VirtualDisplay or output Surface, the captured stream has black bars around the recorded content. The application can avoid the black bars around the recorded content by updating the size of both the VirtualDisplay and output Surface:
override fun onCapturedContentResize(width: Int, height: Int): String { // VirtualDisplay instance from MediaProjection#createVirtualDisplay(). virtualDisplay.resize(width, height, dpi) // Create a new Surface with the updated size. val textureName: Int // the OpenGL texture object name val surfaceTexture = SurfaceTexture(textureName) surfaceTexture.setDefaultBufferSize(width, height) val surface = Surface(surfaceTexture) // Ensure the VirtualDisplay has the updated Surface to send the capture to. virtualDisplay.setSurface(surface) }
The other API is MediaProjection.Callback#onCapturedContentVisibilityChanged(isVisible), which is invoked after capture begins or when the visibility of the captured region changes. The method argument indicates the current visibility of the captured region.
The callback is triggered when:
Applications can take advantage of this callback by showing or hiding the captured content from the output Surface based on whether the captured region is currently visible to the user. You should pause or resume the sharing accordingly in order to conserve resources.
“App screen sharing enables users to share specific information in a Meet call without oversharing private information on the screen like messages and notifications. Users can choose specific apps to share, or they can share the whole screen as before. Additionally, users can leverage split-screen mode on large screen devices to share content while still seeing the faces of friends, families, coworkers, and other meeting participants.” - Product Manager at Google Meet
Let’s see app screen sharing in action during a video call, in this coming-soon version of Google Meet!
App screen sharing opens doors (and windows) for more focused and secure app experiences within the Android ecosystem.
This new feature enhances several use cases:
By thoughtfully implementing app screen sharing, you can establish your app as a champion of user privacy and convenience.
On the eve of the 33rd anniversary of the ADA, we’re sponsoring the captions and audio description of a musical tribute to Judy Heumann.
The inside story of how the Google Meet team progressed background options from blur all the way to animated filters.
As we announced in June, we’re upgrading the Google Duo experience to include all Google Meet features and bringing our two video calling services together into a single solution. This upgrade, which started rolling out last month, gives everyone access to new features like scheduling and joining meetings, virtual backgrounds, in-meeting chat and more, in addition to your current video calling features.
Additional meeting features let you start an instant video call with your entire study group or connect with your colleagues at a recurring scheduled time. Before you join a meeting, you’ll be able to change your background or apply visual effects. During the meeting, you’ll also be able to use in-meeting chat and captions for more ways to participate.
We’re also launching live sharing for Google Meet. Live sharing allows all meeting participants to interact with the content that’s being shared. So whether you’re co-watching videos on YouTube, curating a playlist on Spotify, taking turns while playing games like Heads Up!, UNO! Mobile or Kahoot! during an ice breaker, everyone will be able to join in on the action.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve started rolling out these new features to your Duo app, and now, users are beginning to see their app name and icon update to Google Meet. This upgrade will take place throughout the month across mobile and tablet devices, and will come later for other devices. To ensure a smooth transition, keep your app updated to the latest version.
If you’re using the existing Google Meet app, there will be no change to your experience. Your existing Meet app and icon will change to Google Meet (original). You can continue using this app to join and schedule meetings, but we recommend using the updated Google Meet app to get combined video meeting and calling features all in one place. We will continue to invest in bringing more features to Google Meet to help people to connect, collaborate and share experiences on any device, at home, at school and at work.
We're committed to making the transition as smooth as possible. For more information, please see our Help Center.
When we launched Google One a little over four years ago, our goal was to create a membership to help you get the most out of Google — starting with more storage and expert support. Over the years, we’ve introduced new ways to get more value from your membership, like a VPN for added security, advanced Google Photos editing tools and Google Store rewards.
Today, we’re bringing an even more premium experience to Google One members. Several Google Workspace capabilities, previously only available to businesses with paid Google Workspace subscriptions, are coming to our Premium 2 TB and higher plans.
From keeping in touch with loved ones to learning new skills, video calls have become a core part of our daily lives. To help Google One members stay connected, we’re offering enhanced video calling features from Google Meet in Google Workspace.
Now, you don’t need to stick to the one-hour time limit for group video calls — you can chat with your favorite people for up to 24 hours (great for virtual movie nights and socially-distanced gatherings). You can also filter out background noise, like dog barks or construction sounds, so everyone can hear you more clearly. And finally, you can securely record and store calls to Google Drive to relive and share special moments like virtual birthday celebrations.
Enhanced video calling is starting to roll out today for Google One members on Premium 2 TB and above plans in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and Australia — with more countries coming soon. Over time, Google One members will get access to additional select premium features from Google Workspace — across Google Meet, Gmail and Calendar — and other Google products.
If you’re not already a Google One member, you can sign up for a Premium 2 TB Google One plan. If you’re a business interested in the full set of professional Google Workspace features, sign up for a Google Workspace Business plan.
Editor’s Note: Join us for Google for Education’s product launch event, The Anywhere School 2022, to find out about the latest features to help students pursue their personal potential.
Whether learning takes place in the classroom, or virtually on Google Meet, control remains paramount. It’s also important to enhance educational tools that help take teaching and learning further for every educator and student. Today we’re announcing several new Google Workspace for Education tools rooted in enhancing learning for the individual and classroom, giving educators more control and increasing support for diverse learners.
No one student experience is the same, so it’s a key priority for us to ensure the entire learning environment is enhanced. Earlier this year, we announced many features in Docs, like Assistive Writing features and the ability to use Meet directly in Docs, Sheets and Slides. For our Google Workspace for Education Plus and Teaching and Learning Upgrade customers, we announced live-translated captions in Meet, which allows hosts to add live-translated captions to support video meetings for language classes, multilingual audiences and even parent/guardian teacher conferences.
Today, we’re adding even more features to make Meet useful in the classroom. which are all available in Google Workspace for Education Plus and the Teaching & Learning Upgrade:
We’ve also made significant updates to Originality Reports in both Classroom and Assignments. Schools using Education Plus or the Teaching and Learning Upgrade can soon analyze Microsoft Word documents and backfill their private, school-owned repository with previous student classwork so teachers can compare student-to-student matches, in addition to hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books. Also, starting today, originality reports can run reports in more languages including Dutch, Thai and Tagalog.
We’re adding new Meet features to make sure you have control and can manage your class:
We believe in building with and for people with disabilities, and one of the ways we do that is by building accessibility features directly into our products.
With these improvements, we aim to change the way the classroom is connected, with the ability to teach across various learners’ needs. We look forward to another upcoming school year that is more connected and more personalized, regardless of where learning is taking place.
Carolien Postma is used to testing and retesting (and retesting) new features. She’s a user experience (UX) researcher at Google, a role she describes as “making sure that whatever we build and create, that it actually creates value for our users and that it actually does what our users need it to do.”
Over the past nine months, she’s been part of the team testing the upcoming emoji reactions for Google Meet. “This release was about giving people an easy way to express their feelings and feedback in a way that helped everyone in a call feel more connected,” Carolien says. “This was a fun one, too, because it’s something I can point to that makes my work tangible!”
While the work was certainly fun, it was also important: Emoji help teams celebrate wins and offer support, and it’s important they represent everyone. Because of this, there were plenty of research hours behind the project. Here are a few of the things Carolien and her fellow UX researchers on the team investigated, and how this work turned up in the final designs.
Carolien and her team worked hard to ensure choosing the right emoji was seamless. “We wanted to include emoji that are universally understood, and mean the same or similar things across cultures,” Carolien says. Because other Google products use emoji and emoji reactions, they were able to take a look at this research to inform the new feature. You’ll see that the experience is configured in a way that lets people easily give a thumbs up, clap or heart.
The whole idea behind emoji reactions is to foster a feeling of connection.
Another design choice made as a result of testing was the emoji reactions’ “rhythm.” When Meet participants click an emoji, it floats up across the screen — and when multiple people do this, they all do so with specific timing. It took a while to determine what that timing looked like and felt like. “The whole idea behind emoji reactions is to foster a feeling of connection,” Carolien says. “And we found that if the timing was off, the whole feeling of connectedness fell away.” This research helped the design team settle on a timing that felt human instead of mechanic.
“We wanted emoji reactions to be expressive and convey emotions, and at the same time, not feel like they’re taking over the call and distracting from the meeting,” Carolien explains. The team tested how people reacted not only to the emoji popping up in their meetings, but also to things like where the feature was placed inside Meet calls. “We wanted to make sure it was easy for people to find and allow them to get to it quickly — so no one misses the moment!” In one iteration, Carolien says, the emoji bar was too close to the end call button. “We obviously didn’t want someone to go send an emoji and hang up on their call, so we ended up moving it.”
While Carolien has been a UX researcher for more than 15 years, even she can be surprised by what testing can reveal — case in point, what her team found out about including so-called “negative” emoji reactions. “Initially we only had ‘positive’ emoji — like a smiley or a thumbs-up,” she says. “But then we tested it more and we found that people sometimes need to use a ‘negative’ emoji — like a thumbs-down — to convey something.”
For example, if someone in a call is describing a tough situation they’re going through, a thumbs-up or smiley emoji might be seen as sarcastic, while a face with open mouth emoji ? could be seen as sympathetic to someone’s struggles. Carolien and her team also found that positive emoji (like a thumbs up, or a heart) are used more frequently than negative emoji (a thumbs down), so they intentionally grouped the positive emoji in a way that makes them easy to get to, since people tend to use them more to show support or share kudos.
Emoji reactions in Meet are just part of the latest Google Workplace updates — in the coming weeks, Meet will be available directly in Docs, Sheets and Slides to facilitate collaborative working sessions, and inline threading in Spaces will help keep conversations organized and contextual. Be sure to check out the Google Cloud blog for everything that’s new and coming soon.
Safer Internet Day is about coming together for a better, safer internet – and we at Google for Education are committed to working with schools and families to provide a safe online learning environment. Every day, Google keeps more people safe online than anyone else in the world with products that are secure by default, private by design and put you in control. And this promise extends to all that we build for you, school leaders.
At Google for Education, we’re always looking for new ways to keep you safe. All of our products are private by design, which means they support compliance with the most rigorous data privacy standards — including FERPA, COPPA and GDPR — and are regularly audited by independent, third-party organizations. By making Google for Education products secure by default, we provide additional layers of protection, with ad-free learning experiences that help keep students safe from online threats and age-inappropriate content. And we put you in control, with a dashboard that gives you full visibility of your data and security, regular Google Security Checkups that help you maintain a secure account and additional security features in your security center to protect your school’s data and devices.
Our goal is to support and protect each member of your education community so they can focus on what matters most: teaching and learning.
With our ongoing effort to provide a safer learning environment, we’ve been focusing on combating a prominent security pain point for many schools today: video meetings. We’re excited to share some recently announced enhanced security measures for Google Meet to help educators and students connect in a full class setting or one-on-one with fewer distractions and more privacy and security.
In-meeting moderation controls: To help educators engage with their students, we’ve added more ways to help moderate class meetings and eliminate unwanted intrusions or interruptions. With these new features hosts can:
Control and visibility: We know admins need more ways to protect their schools and more data and insights to drive comprehensive decision making, so we’ve rolled out additional admin features that allow them to:
Google Classroom integration: We’re making Meet and Classroom work even better together. The Google Meet integration with Classroom helps educators meet and work with their classes more easily and securely, allowing them to:
In addition to these newly added moderation and security features, Google Meet runs on one of the world's most advanced security infrastructures for scalability and control. Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). In Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default, whether meeting on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, or in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware. Meeting IDs are 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set, making unauthorized access by guessing the ID extremely difficult.
We look forward to sharing more about our work to keep you safer with Google, including details on our new partnership with Khan Academy to develop free, online lessons that will help teach people how to stay safe online.
We remain committed to providing industry-leading privacy and security protections built into Google for Education products, which enable students and teachers to work better together by connecting safely and securely.
Posted by Francesco Romano – Developer Relations Engineer on Android