AI Powered Makeup in Google Meet (www.neowin.net)

Google Meet is expanding its Touch-up appearance tools with AI-powered makeup: 12 preset looks—from subtle professional enhancements to more expressive styles—can be applied before or during calls via the "Backgrounds and effects" → "Appearance" tab. The effect persists across movements (e.g., sipping coffee or touching your face) and is saved for future meetings; users can remove it with "Turn off visual effects" or "Remove all." The feature is rolling out to a broad set of Google Workspace customers (Business and Enterprise tiers, Education Plus, select add-ons) as well as Google One and Workspace Individual subscribers. Meet also added a shared countdown timer in the web client to help keep meetings on schedule. For the AI/ML community, this signals continued investment in real‑time face detection, tracking and AR-style rendering at scale—systems that must maintain alignment and natural-looking rendering across pose, occlusion and lighting. Deploying these effects to millions of users raises practical concerns and opportunities around latency, model efficiency, fairness (skin‑tone and feature bias), privacy, and user consent. The saved-setting UX and in-call controls suggest attention to usability and product adoption, while the underlying tech could be reused for other live-video applications like accessibility features or remote collaboration tools.