If you’ve ever been on a Google Meet call and the person on the other end was struggling with their microphone, you know how frustrating it can be to try to concentrate on what they’re saying while also trying to ignore the background noise.
Currently, any participant in a Google Meet who has a noise cancellation-enabled account can turn on the feature regardless of what type of account the meeting organizer has. But this approach makes things inconsistent for other participants in a meeting, who could have different levels of access to noise cancellation based on their own accounts. So starting next week, Google will change this so that if a meeting organizer can use noise cancellation, all participants in the meeting can as well. Google announced new updates via their blog post:
To start with, if a meeting organizer has noise cancellation turned on (and their Google Workspace edition supports that), then everyone in the meeting will automatically have the option to use it. So even if the individual attendees don’t have noise cancellation enabled for their account, they can still use it in this case.
Conversely, if an individual user does have noise cancellation turned on for their account, they’ll be able to use it for all meetings — even ones where the organizer doesn’t have noise cancellation.
Lastly, anyone using a Google Meet hardware device will always be able to enable noise cancellation for themselves and for other participants.
To enable noise cancellation for yourself in a meeting, click on “More actions” (the three dots) at the bottom of the screen and select “Noise suppression.” If you want to enable it for everyone else, go to “Manage participants” at the top of the screen and select “Noise suppression.
In general, we like what Google is doing here. Most of us would probably prefer to use a noise-canceling microphone whenever possible, especially in a professional setting. By offering this feature on the platform level, Google Meet is not only keeping things convenient but also presenting users with compatible hardware options the chance to take advantage of noise cancellation even without their dedicated microphone.
