Google Meet’s noise cancellation feature expands to more countries

Google announced its AI-powered noise cancellation feature for the Meet teleconferencing app in early June. It’s still not available to everyone, but it will expand to cover a few more countries. Here’s what the support page says:

“Important: This feature will roll out to users in Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, and New Zealand in the coming weeks. This feature isn’t currently available to users in South Africa, UAE, and the immediately surrounding areas.”

Once this feature reaches you, it will be on by default (you will find it in the Settings, Audio menu). You can turn it off in case non-speech sound is important for what you’re doing (e.g. playing a musical instrument).

If you’re wondering about trying it, note that Google made the premium features free for everyone through September 30. This means your meetings can have up to 250 participants, they can be livestreamed and recorded. Normally, these features are available only to G Suite users.

There are more new features too. You can blur your background or change it entirely (no need to set up a green screen either). There’s also closed captioning, which transcribes speech into subtitles (this only works in English for now though).

Source: Gsmarena