Several of these safety options have been available for Google Workspace Education customers, but Google wants to bring them to more people who use Google Meet. The expectation is these changes will encourage meeting productivity, cut down on distractions, and reduce the moderation workload for hosts. These features will not be available to all Workspace accounts, however. The official Workspace Updates announcement has the full list of what is and isn’t included. Hosts will be able to add up to 25 co-hosts to a meeting, and can decide whether or not to give co-hosts various host controls. Both hosts and co-hosts who have been granted access will also be able to better moderate meetings with the Host Management option. With it you can limit who can join, share a screen, and send chat messages, as well as mute everyone or end the call for all participants. The People panel also is getting an update that will let the host (and co-hosts, if allowed) search for specific meeting participants. This should make it easier to find a specific user to give them co-hosting privileges, mute them, or kick them out if they’re causing trouble. A gradual rollout for these new Google Meet features is planned to begin on Monday, with Google expecting it to take up to 15 days to finish. There also will be a Workspace Updates Blog post going up for administrators “in the coming weeks” to detail the new Host Management settings.
