Two major new versions are on their way to Google Duo, both of which were previously leaked in the chat app throughout 2018.
The first new feature will be video chatting for groups of users to compete with Apple's Group FaceTime in iOS 12, and the second feature is a low-light mode for better video chatting even when you don't have perfect lighting.
The group chat feature will allow groups of up to 7 users to video chat, whenever it's rolled out. Hard to tell if that 7 person cap is going to be a limit just for the early testing or if Google is only going to allow groups of that specific size, but it does seem rather low compared to Apple's 32 user group chats. I can't imagine video chatting with 31 other people would be very fun for most things, but if you're in a business or learning situation, I can see the appeal. Google doesn't, though.
But it doesn't matter how many people are in your video chat if they can't see you, and that's where the low-light mode comes in. Similar to Snapchat's low-light mode, when you toggle it on Duo will brighten up your camera feed to make things a little bit easier for everyone else to see. Don't expect any miracles like what we got out of the Pixel's Night Sight feature, since brightening up front-facing cameras usually just turns into a soft image, but it'll definitely be a better experience than just a black blur with moving lines.
There's no telling when Google will actually be rolling these out, since the users that got ahold of them early appear to have been lucky enough to slip into a server-side test. Hopefully we'll get the features before Google I/O this year.
source: Android Police
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