If you’re anything like me, you use Google platforms almost every day for school, from Google Calendar (mine is color-coded) to simply using the search engine when you have a question. And even though it does take me back to the pandemic days of online school, I do end up using Google Meet a lot too, for all sorts of meetings and interviews.Â
But as much as I love Google Meet, and how easy it is to use, the platform recently underwent a new update that some users have found slightly overwhelming and inconvenient. Essentially, the in-meeting messages in Google Meet, which are frequently used to ask questions or to share thoughts, now auto-populate into the Google Chat message section of Gmail. Depending on the meeting, there can be tons of messages going through the Google Meet chat, which now, because of this update, means a ton of notifications coming through your Gmail.Â
Obviously, this many notifications can be a lot to deal with, especially because it comes right in the moment, while you’re in the middle of the meeting. And even though you could just turn your devices onto Do Not Disturb mode, you still have to go through the hassle of clearing them all later, which is just another thing to tack onto the end of the long to-do lists many college students are endlessly working through. But thankfully, if you find this feature unnecessary or would just prefer to not have to worry about it, there actually are a few options for users to turn it off.
The first option allows users to turn off this feature on a meeting-by-meeting basis, so if you think it would be helpful to have a record of your in-meeting messages, you can leave it on — and then if you wish to turn it off for a specific meeting, simply go to the meeting invite and click the gear icon located next to the Google Meet link. Then, go to the section called “Chat Moderation” and then, in the “Host Controls” section, turn off the feature by deselecting the “Continuous Meeting Chat” button. This will eliminate the stream of messages in the Gmail chat for that particular meeting. This method will have to be done for every meeting you attend, though, so make sure you remember to do it if you don’t want those meeting chats to come through!
If that’s not your vibe, there are a few other options to try. For starters, you can turn off the Gmail chat feature entirely, which you can do in Gmail settings. When you go to your settings, press “Chat and Meet” and deselect the “Google Chat” feature. This will prevent any notifications from Google Chat coming into your Gmail inbox, so you won’t have to deal with any of the notifications at all. You could also go into Google Chat settings and simply turn off notifications. These options could be useful if you think that having that record of the meeting chat is important, but you don’t want to have to sort through a ton of notifications. However, keep in mind that both these options apply to all Gchats, not just chats from Google Meet meetings.
So, even if you’re not the biggest fan of this Google Meet feature, you can play around with the settings to make sure you’re getting the user experience you want!