Google Meet Hosts Can Now Mute People for As Long As They Want

Video calls are often interrupted by people coughing into their microphones, carrying on conversations with someone close to them, or speaking over each other. No longer: Google Meet's latest feature allows meeting hosts to disable other people's audio and video feeds and, perhaps even more importantly, prevent those people from re-enabling the feeds themselves.

Google said this feature will be available to all Google Workspace, G Suite Basic, and G Suite Business customers. It started to make its way to Rapid Release domains (which receive feature updates sooner than other domains) on Oct. 21 and is expected to take up to 15 days to roll out. Scheduled Release domains will be subject to the same 15-day rollout starting on Nov. 1.

The ability to mute individual users and prevent them from unmuting themselves will apply to Google Meet's desktop client as well as its mobile applications. Smartphone users also can't try to work around the feature by using a version of the app that doesn't support it; Google said they won't be allowed to join a room where this feature is enabled until they update their software.

This new feature is part of Google's continued efforts to improve Google Meet—often by making it easier for meeting organizers to maintain some semblance of order in their calls. Hosts started to receive the ability to mute every desktop user in a “room” back in February, for example, and Google later extended support for those controls to Google Meet's mobile apps as well.

Google Meet wasn't the only service updated to make focusing, whether it's on a person who's speaking or an important task, a little easier. Google also introduced a new Google Calendar entry type called Focus time that, “similar to the Out of office event type, has a different appearance on your calendar and includes the option to automatically decline conflicting events.”