You may need a way to mute people when making phone calls with your team in order to make everyone listen to a member in the community or if you want to talk during a meeting. Fortunately for you during a call, big communication tools like Google Meet, allow you to mute the microphones of other people.
But you may want to unmute the other person as the conversation progresses to hear their feedback and let them work on the idea. The following post will help to unmute a Google Meet participant.
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Can you unmute a participant on Google Meet
At the time of this article, no. Once you have muted them, Google does not provide a way to unmute a participant in Google Meet.
Why can’t you unmute a participant in Google Meet
Google says that for privacy purposes, you can not unmute another user on Google Meet. This makes sense because you wouldn’t want other members of the meeting to hear you before you invite them to after you’ve been silenced as a delegate. This way, without your permission, the other side does not get to turn your microphone on remotely.
So you will need to ask the participant to unmute himself so that he can be understood by other people. He is then able to unmute himself. The guide below explains how you can unmute yourself.
Can you expect an update in the future?
Maybe. Google is working on bringing new moderation controls for meeting hosts as is listed on its Upcoming G Suite releases webpage. The “Meeting moderation controls” feature has been described to include options that provide meeting hosts more control during the meeting.
Although these include muting, presenting, invites, and more updates, we can not guarantee that an upcoming update on Google Meet can add the ability to unmute another user. Meeting moderation is in development” at the moment, meaning it may be a few months before we get to hear anything about it.
How to unmute yourself on Google Meet
You can unmute yourself during a meeting by following the steps below.
When using Meet on the web
Step 1: Open Google Meet on your PC and join a meeting.
Step 2: On the meeting screen, you can unmute by pressing the microphone at the bottom, highlighted in red if you have muted yourself before or were muted by others. This will transform the microphone button into a white one, meaning that everyone in the meeting will now hear your voice.
Left: Microphone muted; Right: Microphone unmuted
When using the Google Meet app on your phone
Step 1: Open the Google Meet app on your phone and join a meeting.
Step 2: You can unmute yourself in a meeting by clicking the microphone at the bottom, highlighted in red.
When using phone audio
In addition to PC users and the mobile app, you can connect anyone to a Google Meet video meeting by phone. You can unmute yourself by pressing ‘*6‘ on the dial-pad if you’re a phone member and you’ve been muted during a meeting. During a conference, you can also click ‘*6‘ to silence your microphone.
What else can you do?
If you look throughly, the Upcoming G Suite releases webpage also teases a “Hand raise” feature as one of Google Meet’s future additions. As the feature description explains itself, you can use the Hand raise tool to “raise attention to yourself” without needing to interrupt a meeting session.
The feature should be similar to the Zoom Raise Hand option, which encourages participants to raise their hand in a meeting so that if you have been previously muted by the host, you can speak up and express your input during a meeting. The Hand raise Google Meet tool is currently being created, which means that in the coming months you can expect the functionality to drop within meetings.
Until then, try this tool
Using Push to Chat during Google Meetings is the easiest way to stop the mute/unmute scenario. If you mostly use the video conferencing service on your PC, then you can install this extension on your Google Chrome web browser. In order to speak up during a meeting, the extension provides a similar function to that of walkie talkie so much that press the Space key on the keyboard.
Your mic will remain muted at all other times, thereby providing a smooth way to have a conversation between large groups of people. This also means that during a conference, participants are not forced to press a handful of buttons on their computer to mute and unmute themselves continuously.
If you’re a meeting host, you can request everyone else in a meeting to install this extension which also lets users personalize which key they want to use as their hotkey to ‘push to talk’.
Are you looking for a way to unmuting participants on Google Meet? Did the above guide help you do that? Let us know in the comments below.
