Google Meet gets picture-in-picture mode on Chrome

As nice as it is to see your colleagues, sometimes you secretly want to dig into your mailbox during an online meeting. It is now possible to display Google Meet picture-in-picture, so you don’t have to slide all kinds of windows to multitask.

Picture-in-picture

Everyone probably does it at some point: open the mailbox on one side of their screen and the meeting on the other. That does mean, however, that you have to keep dragging those windows around, or you have to take for granted that you don’t see your colleagues for a while and keep all screens maximized.

That’s over for good now. If you’re video conferencing in Google Meet, you can now display picture-in-picture. This means that you can have your mailbox as open as possible, with somewhere in a corner is a rectangle with the person who is currently speaking in your meeting (or his/her presentation). Very nice, because previously you had to use a separate extension for that.

Google Meet

It’s not completely new to the world of video conferencing software: Microsoft Teams, for example, has been doing it for quite some time. Now it comes to Google Meet if you use it in Chrome. In the small screen of Google Meet, you don’t see everyone in your meeting, but four people (probably the most recently said).

In the meantime, you can view documents or just secretly play games, although you should of course always remain aware of any cameras and microphones that are on. To enable picture-in-picture, right-click on your meeting and select the option from the context menu. Google also comes with multipin, in which you can pin multiple screens (people) within Meet if you want to view them longer.

For everyone

When both of these options will come to Meet is unknown. It would now be rolled out. The advantage is that it’s not just for people with a business account, it’s for everyone, but the disadvantage is that we don’t know exactly when it will arrive yet.

Are you someone who multitasks a lot during online meetings? How do you usually solve it if you don’t have a picture-in-picture? Share it in the comments.