Google Meet will soon let you check your appearance before joining a video call

Google Meet
(Image credit: Google)

A new update is coming to Google Meet that will allow users to check their appearance and make sure there are no technical issues before joining a video call. The update should leave users feeling more confident that everything appears as it should and help avoid any embarrassing mishaps.

“We’re making it possible to quickly preview how you’ll appear to others before entering a Google Meet video call,” a Google Workspace Update explained. “You can use this new functionality to confirm that peripheral devices are properly configured and corrected, to check that your network connectivity is good, and to understand the impact of noise cancellation on your audio (if it's available to your account).”

Before joining a meeting, Google Meet users will soon be able to click the "Check your audio and video" button. This will open the “green room,” where individuals will be able to preview their audio and video settings and generally make sure everything is to their liking before the meeting begins.

Meet mishaps

Some common issues that the new feature should help solve include having an unintentionally muted microphone, using a secondary display monitor that has a missing audio connection, as well as other similar issues, such as poor sound quality, audio that’s too loud, or a microphone amplifying background noises.

The new feature will also allow individuals to make more minor adjustments to improve their meeting experience. This might include improving their positioning or adjusting the lighting to make sure they are easily seen by other meeting participants.

The “green room” feature has already started a gradual rollout and should start to appear within Google Meet over the next two weeks.

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Barclay Ballard

Barclay has been writing about technology for a decade, starting out as a freelancer with ITProPortal covering everything from London’s start-up scene to comparisons of the best cloud storage services.  After that, he spent some time as the managing editor of an online outlet focusing on cloud computing, furthering his interest in virtualization, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.