Google Meet adding new effects panel so you can quickly blur your background and more

Google Meet is introducing a new side panel to give you quick access to effects like background blur, background images, and styles. This will be accessible to you during and before a call. If you choose to tweak these options prior to your meeting, you’ll do so from the green room self-check. Trying them out before the call can reduce meeting distractions and help you find the perfect fit ahead of time!

Look for this new panel over the next two weeks as it began its rollout yesterday for Rapid Release domains. If you have a Scheduled Release domain, you’ll have to wait for up to two weeks starting on September 16, 2021, but as always, this should provide you with plenty of time to familiarize your organization with how to use it and make sure it fits into your workflow.

If you’re an administrator of an Education or Enterprise for Education domain and you don’t want anyone on your team using custom or blurred backgrounds for the sake of professionalism, then you can check out the ‘Let users select custom images’ option in your dashboard. For the record, it will be off by default, but it’s still good to know you can toggle it based on your needs.

I know that we’re all accustomed to how bad the virtual backgrounds in Zoom and other software can be, so it’s easy to decide that these won’t be used for your business or school, but Google Meet – while not perfect – has pretty great background cutout via AI and machine learning, so I would recommend giving it a chance before deciding against it. I’m interested to hear in the comments how many of you will be using this and how many of you will keep it turned off.

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