Google Meet Will Now Tell You When You Have a Poor Network Connection

Google Meet is introducing a feature that will send users a notification if their Internet connection is poor. It will also provide tailored troubleshooting recommendations as well as quick actions to reduce the video chat app's resource consumption. Google will also provide Workspace admins access to view and troubleshoot instances with the Meet Quality Tool when users are unable to join calls. The Workspace admin tool has already been made available while Google Meet's new features have begun rolling out from June 1.

Through a series of posts on its Workspace blog, Google announced a host of new features that will improve the calling experience on Google Meet. If a user's Internet connection is poor, the chat app will provide a "notification bubble describing the issue and a red dot on the 'More options' menu." From there, users can select Troubleshooting & help that will give users important information on the issue and provide troubleshooting guidance.

Google Meet will also provide tailored troubleshooting recommendations in the form of personalised suggestions based on detected performance issues. The blog states, "this can be useful in situations where decreases in available processing resources are impacting call quality, such as your device automatically lowering CPU speed to extend battery life."

Additionally, some quick actions will also be recommended by Google Meet to improve call quality. These quick, one-click changes will help reduce the apps resource consumption by using less CPU or network bandwidth. It will also provide suggestions for a better user experience, such as adding closed captions to help better understand the audio.

For Google Workspace admins, there is a refreshed Meet Quality Tool, that will help them analyse the reasons for users' unsuccessful attempts at joining a call. "You'll notice a new icon in the timeline that indicates a failed join attempt — to view more information, simply hover over the icon," reads the blog by Google.

Google Workspace admins will be able to see failed connection attempts when a user tries to join a call that is at its maximum participant capacity, denied entry by a participant in the call, request timed out as no one in the call responded, or re-joined a call after being removed or their account was denied due to prior abuse. With these new features for the Meet Quality Tool, admins can now quickly help users without them contacting Google for support.

These new features are available for all Google Workspace users as well as G Suite basic and business customers. For Admins, the Meet Quality Tool update has already rolled out. While the new features for Google Meet will utilise Google's Rapid and Scheduled rollout domains where the users registered in the former domain have started receiving the update from June 1. Users in the scheduled rollout domain could potentially have to wait longer than 15 days to see the new features.