Breakout rooms and live video conferences may be in the pipeline.
What you need to know
- Google Duo may add the ability to split video chat participants into breakout rooms in the future.
- The app will also let users live and record video calls in a future update, similar to what Meet does.
- These features were discovered while tearing down the latest version of Duo.
Since the search giant turned its attention to Google Meet, Google Duo has had few updates. For a long time, though, the Duo may finally be getting some love in a future update after receiving a simplified home screen interface last July.
Google has launched a new version of the Duo app on Android phones, and a teardown by XDA Developers has revealed some familiar findings. The updated version contains some code strings that suggest the video chat app will opt for breakout rooms.
If you regularly use Google Meet to hold virtual meetings with colleagues or friends, you’re probably already familiar with breakout rooms. It allows video chat hosts to divide participants into smaller groups during a meeting. If Google releases this feature, it will be useful for large video chats of up to 32 people.
Breakout rooms launched on Meet in late 2020, with additional features like custom backgrounds and attendance tracking. It’s a welcome addition to Duo, assuming it makes its way into apps, after Google reportedly scrapped plans to merge Duo and Meet into a single app.
This isn’t the only Meet feature that Duo might adopt in the future. The teardown also hints at the ability to live stream and record video conferences. It specifically contains references to messages such as “The live broadcast is about to begin” and “This meeting is being streamed and recorded.”
These features are not currently available to anyone as they are still in development. But it wouldn’t hurt if Google rolled them out in the future.
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