Ever since the coronavirus-induced lockdown forced the new-normal upon us, video calling and video conferences have become a vital part of our lifestyle. Applications like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams etc. replaced the regular dining or travel assistant applications and to their credit, these video conferencing applications have made drastic changes to help improve the user experience.
On the same lines, Google had earlier promised to make video calls more accessible for the users who are slightly less tech-savvy and now it has finally announced that Next Hub Max users will now be able to make Zoom calls using the smart speaker cum display.
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With the help of this new feature, users will now be able to initiate or join group video calls without their smartphones or computers – right from their smart displays. Though, users located in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia will be the first to review this feature.
According to the official Google blog post, this feature is arriving as an “early preview” and users who’re looking to use this feature already may need to opt-in to receive the relevant firmware update. This update, as per Google, is just an early version of the software that will be released for all the users globally.
Google explains that this feature will support both free or paid tiers of Zoom and users can simply ask the Google Assistant to initiate the call and also can tell the assistant about their preferred application for the call. Though, to use Zoom for calls, users will need to link the Zoom account with their Google account, beforehand.
Additionally, Google has revealed that Google Wifi and Nest Wifi have got a facility to automatically identify and prioritize video conferencing on Google Meet and Zoom Meetings and that the new video call feature on the Next Hub Max will be able to benefit from it as well.
To recall, even Amazon had announced that the Echo Show devices will be getting the Zoom call support before the end of the year, however, there was no timeline specified for the same.
