Meetings in Google Meet give you and your participants the ability to message each other using chat. While this is great for teams working on a single project, it can get pretty annoying if you don’t want audience engagement. This is especially true in virtual classrooms where teachers want a way to moderate the chat for their students. So can you disable chat during a Google Meet meeting? Let’s take a quick look.

Unfortunately, Google Meet doesn’t let you disable chats during meetings before or after you host them. This is a highly requested feature that Google is apparently working on and should be available in future updates to Google Meet. For now, there’s no way to automatically disable chats.

Related: How to Register Attendance in Google Meet

This proves to be quite a cumbersome situation for hosts who conduct virtual classes and webinars, where there is no way to moderate the chat section, regardless of whether you are using a personal or G Suite account. Educators in particular seem to be the users most affected by the lack of this feature.