How to invite others to your Google Duo call with a link

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff.

Duo is Google’s video chatting app, and, like almost all video-chatting apps, it’s getting a lot more use during the coronavirus lockdown than it did before. It’s now rolling out a feature that allows users to invite friends to a call with a link.

In case you’re wondering what’s the difference between Google Duo and Google Meet: unlike Meet (or Hangouts, for that matter), which are designed to accommodate multiple people, Google Duo is more like a person-to-person call. Think of it like FaceTime to Meet’s Zoom.

Read: How to start a Google Meet session from Gmail

Before now, you’d invite other users to a Duo call by entering their phone number or email address, but Google revealed earlier this year it was working on a way to invite users to join a call with a link, as with Meet. Google has now appears to have rolled out this ability to anyone who has the current version of the mobile app.

Note: it’ll only work if the person who receives it has a Google account.

In order to access the link, you need to tap “Create Group” in the iOS or Android versions of the app (it’s only available on mobile at the moment). Once you’ve created the group and invited at least one other person, you should see the invite link right in front of you. Once you send it to the person in question and they’ve opened it, it’ll automatically launch the app on their device and drop them into the call.

And that’s it! Now you can invite others to your Duo calls as easily as you would a Zoom call. Good luck!