<!–How to Fix the Most Annoying Feature in Google Hangouts • Gear Patrol<!– –>

See Everybody


We’re getting intimately familiar with using video chat services right now. The most popular being Zoom, Skype and Google Hangouts. If you use Zoom, you’ll know that it has a popular mode that allows you to view all meeting participants in one big grid, so you can see everyone at once. But Google Hangouts doesn’t have this feature.

Instead, Google Hangouts forces you to use ‘smart’ mode where it just puts whoever is talking (or otherwise making noise) in the middle of the screen. You have very little control over this, aside from pinning someone else’s face to the screen, and you can only really see one person at a time on the screen. Fortunately, there’s a Chrome Extension that can fix that.

It’s called the Google Meet Enhancement Suite and it adds a bunch of features that make video conferencing easier on Google Hangouts. It has a “Grid Layout” mode, which is the same popular feature that Zoom has; there’s a “Push to Talk” feature that allows you to quickly mute and unmute yourself; and there’s an “Auto Join” feature that lets you go straight to the meeting, skipping the default join screen.

The best part? This Chrome extension is free.

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Tucker Bowe

Tucker Bowe has been on Gear Patrol’s editorial team since 2014. As a Tech Staff Writer, he tracks everything in the consumer tech space, from headphones to smartphones, wearables to home theater systems. If it lights up or makes noise, he probably covers it.

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