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Google offers another video-calling app

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 07 Mar 2017
The Google Meet Web site is live.
The Google Meet Web site is live.

Google has quietly introduced another Web-based video conferencing application, called Google Meet.

No official comment has been offered by Google, but the site is live.

There is no option to schedule a new conference call yet. The site asks users for a meeting code or ID to join a pre-scheduled call. This is different to the company's Hangouts product, and seems to be aimed at businesses that want to hold face-to-many-faces conferences but want to keep the line closed.

Hangouts lets users send text messages; Meet appears to be video-only.

TechCrunch spotted a mobile version in the Apple App Store, called Meet by Google Hangouts, but it has since been pulled from the store.

Competitors in the space include Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp, Microsoft's Skype and Apple's FaceTime, as well as a series of business video conferencing sites.

This is Google's third play at video-calling. It previously introduced Google Hangouts, and last year, the company launched Duo, a mobile-only face-to-face video communication app. Duo is a bare minimum app and does not allow for multiple people to join the conversation.

Last year, Google also launched Google Allo, a smart messaging app for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Allo differentiates itself from other messaging apps by allowing users to chat to Google Assistant within conversations. This means conversations in the app will be littered with extra information curated by the artificially intelligent personal assistant.

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