Sounding your best in a meeting is crucial for clear and effective communication. However, remote work environments often present challenges, such as distracting background noises, audio feedback and poor network connectivity. All of those challenges can lead to a disruptive meeting experience that makes it harder for participants to engage with you and could even impact your ability to participate at all.
Whether you’re joining a meeting from your laptop, desktop or mobile device, Google Meet offers a range of features to tackle these challenges and help you deliver clear, professional audio. We explore these features in detail below and share other general pointers you can leverage in your next meeting to sound your best and communicate effectively with everyone on the call.
Specifically, we share tips on how to:
- Create a quiet environment
- Leverage Google Meet audio settings and features to sound your best
- Use Gemini to automatically improve audio quality
Looking your best in a Google Meet call is also important for making a positive impression, feeling confident and building meaningful connections. We share tips, tricks and features on this topic in the first instalment of our “Bringing your best self to Google Meet” series.The series also includes a blog post about how to look and sound your best when joining a call from a meeting room with Google Meet Hardware. You can read both blog posts here:
Create a quiet environment
The first step to sounding your best is finding a quiet space to join your meeting. Whether you're at home or in the office, choosing a secluded area where you won't be disturbed ensures you are free from any distractions and can focus on the meeting without loud background noises. Avoid areas with high foot traffic, such as kitchens or busy corridors, if possible.
If you're joining the meeting from a desktop or laptop and are alone, consider using a high-quality speaker microphone like the Logi Dock to improve audio quality and suppress background noise. You can control the meeting, including muting and unmuting yourself, directly from the Logi Dock and your mute status will synchronise between the hardware and the Google Meet call.
If you’re unable to find a quiet space, noise cancelling headsets like the Poly Voyager Focus 2 ensure participants can hear you loudly and clearly even in noisy environments. The Poly Voyager Focus 2 has three levels of Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) and Acoustic Fence technology to prioritise and amplify your voice whilst silencing background noise. This allows you to take meetings virtually anywhere, including airports, trains and busy cafés, without compromising the quality of your audio.
Before joining a call, you can test your audio in the Google Meet green room to ensure everything is working correctly. You can also see which of your peripheral devices are available and connected. This saves you from navigating through the settings menu during a meeting and losing focus on what’s important.
Leverage Google Meet audio settings and features
To limit distractions during a meeting, Google Meet offers noise cancellation which you can enable from your desktop, laptop, mobile or Google Meet Hardware. Noise cancellation filters out unwanted background sounds, such as ⌨️ typing, 🐶 dogs barking or the sounds of nearby 🚗 traffic, and keeps the focus on human voices. You can even see how much background noise is being removed from your calls with a visual indicator in Google Meet on the web.
When participants join meetings from different devices, some people can sound louder or quieter than others which may be a distraction. To prevent this from happening, Google Meet automatically adjusts the volume of each participant to level out loudness, ensuring that everyone can be heard equally, at the same volume – no matter the device from which they’re joining. To use the automatic volume levelling feature, you need to enable Google Meet noise cancellation.
To avoid audio feedback, it may be beneficial to mute yourself when you aren't speaking during a call. If you're only planning to speak briefly, consider using the push-to-talk shortcut. This lets you push and hold the spacebar to quickly unmute yourself and then release the spacebar to return to a muted state. It is ideal for making sure you don't run the risk of forgetting to mute yourself afterwards.
Call control also lets you control your mute status using your headsets, speaker microphones or other USB peripherals and it will be synchronised with Google Meet. For instance, if you have a flip-to-mute headset and physically flip up your microphone, your mute status will automatically update in Google Meet, so even if participants can't see the physical indicator they still know that you're muted.
If your computer’s speaker or microphone isn’t working properly or your network connection is poor, you can use your phone for audio with Meet’s dial-in and dial-out capabilities. This allows you to participate fully in the meeting, including sharing your video feed, viewing other participants’ video feeds, presenting content and engaging in interactive features like whiteboarding and in-meeting chat from your computer whilst simultaneously speaking and listening through your phone.
💡 Note: charges may apply. To find out where you can use a phone with Meet, see the complete list of supported countries here.
In addition to sounding your best for participants, there are a range of settings and features available in Google Meet to make the meeting sound better for you. On Google Pixel 7 devices and up, you can enable speaker separation from the Google Meet settings menu to create a more dynamic and lifelike meeting experience. This lets you hear audio from different directions based on the position of the participants on your screen, making it easier to distinguish who's speaking and where the audio is coming from.
In situations where it may be difficult to hear the speaker, enabling live captions and encouraging other participants to do the same can help everyone better understand and follow along with what's being said. If you’re a mixed-language team, translated captions* allow everyone to access the meeting in their preferred language, removing barriers that would otherwise impede communication.
💡 Note: from January 2025, translated captions in Google Meet will become available exclusively to specific Gemini for Google Workspace add-ons. Learn more here.
AI enhancements
When using a Bluetooth headset with a computer or dialling into a Google Meet call from your phone, Gemini’s studio sound* feature automatically improves your audio quality by recreating higher audio frequencies. This ensures everyone can hear you clearly and is automatically applied when Google Meet noise cancellation is enabled.
*These features require select Gemini for Google Workspace add-ons. Compare the Gemini add-ons here.
Discover More Tips on Looking and Sounding Your Best in Google Meet
Want some tips on looking your best in Google Meet calls? We’ve got you covered! The first instalment of our “Bringing your best self to Google Meet” series explores features like virtual backgrounds, portrait touch-up and camera framing to help you make a great first impression. You can read it here.
In the third instalment, we share how to look and sound your best from a meeting room with Google Meet Hardware. This includes everything from creating the perfect meeting space to leveraging device- and software-based features to help you present yourself clearly and confidently. You can read it here.