You may not have noticed it, but Google Workspace added a new feature to Meet this month. Here’s how it works:
If you are the only person in a Google Meet, you’ll get a prompt after 5 minutes asking if you want to continue the Meet, or leave. It looks like this:
If you don’t respond to the prompt within 2 minutes, you’ll be automatically disconnected from the Meet. Google hopes to help people avoid unintentionally sharing their audio and video.
But if you’re in your standard office hours and you’re multitasking, it’s very easy to miss the warning and be booted from your own Meet.
This feature is on by default, so if you don’t want your Meets to work this way, you can edit your Meet settings and turn off Leave empty calls. Here’s how:
- Launch a Meet and join the call.
- Go to the More options menu and select Settings.
- In the Settings panel choose General and toggle Leave empty calls off.
When you successfully turn the setting off, you’ll see a grey minus sign instead of the blue check shown above. And, you’ll be able to stay in an empty Meet instead of the call ending automatically.