Google Duo seeing 10 million new users per week, adding new features

Google Duo is seeing 10 million new sign-ups per week amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and is getting new features to enhance users’ experiences.

“Every week, over 10 million new people are signing up for Duo, and in many countries, call minutes have increased by more than ten-fold,” Google wrote in a blog post. 

The tech giant notes there has been an increase of 180 percent more messages being sent, and says that users will soon have the option to automatically save their messages in Duo instead of having them expire after 24 hours. Google says that this will make it easier to preserve meaningful messages.

The platform will also soon be getting new video codec technology to improve video call quality and reliability, even on low bandwidth connections.

Google Duo also recently increased the maximum group call size to 12 participants from eight, and now the company says that it plans to increase the number of participants allowed even more in the coming weeks.

“On Android and iOS, we recently increased our group size to 12 participants (instead of 8), and in the coming weeks we plan to increase participants even further,” Google wrote.

Users will also soon be able to take a photo with someone they’re on a call with to capture the moment on a phone, tablet or chromebook, and then share it automatically with everyone on the call.

Source: Google