Google Workspace Changes

Google Meet introduces waiting rooms for hosts to control participant entry and manage meetings more effectively.

Google Meet is introducing a new waiting room feature that provides hosts and co-hosts with greater control over meeting entry. This feature allows participants to join a waiting room before entering the main call, enabling hosts to admit or deny entry, send one-way announcements, and even move existing participants back to the waiting room. This is designed to prevent interruptions, allow hosts to prepare, and ensure smoother, more productive discussions, especially useful for scenarios like board meetings or interviews.

Ask Gemini in Google Meet is rolling out to Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus domains, providing AI assistance for meeting summaries, key takeaways, and catching up on discussions.

The 'Ask Gemini in Meet' feature is now rolling out to Google Workspace Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus domains. This update brings the power of Gemini directly into Google Meet, acting as a personal assistant to enhance meeting productivity. Users can leverage Ask Gemini to summarize ongoing discussions, get recaps of what was said, identify key takeaways, decisions, and action items, and even catch up on missed content if they joined late and Gemini-powered note-taking was enabled. Interactions with Ask Gemini are private to the user, and it generates answers by referring to meeting captions, user-permitted Google Workspace resources, and public web content. Caption data is not stored post-meeting, and it does not generate meeting recordings or transcripts. Currently, only English meetings are supported, with more languages to follow. Ask Gemini in Meet is on by default but can be managed by meeting hosts and admins.

Google Meet introduces 12 new AI-powered makeup looks.

Google Meet is expanding its video touch-up feature with 12 new AI-powered studio makeup looks. These options range from professional to expressive, and the AI ensures the makeup remains seamless and natural-looking during movements like sipping coffee or touching the face, allowing users to better express their personal style during video calls.

Google Meet live captions now support Cantonese.

Google Meet is adding support for Cantonese to its live caption feature, allowing users to view real-time text of what is being spoken in meetings. This enhancement improves accessibility and inclusion for Cantonese-speaking users by ensuring discussions, presentations, and training sessions are fully understood, regardless of hearing ability or connectivity.

Ability to set timers in Google Meet on the web.

Google Meet is introducing a new feature that allows users to set timers during web meetings. This tool, managed by hosts/co-hosts (or anyone if host controls are off), will be visible to all participants and can be paused or canceled. Timers aim to enhance meeting focus, time management, and equitable participation by providing a shared visual time reference, ultimately structuring meetings and boosting productivity.

Event organizers can now enable the Gemini-powered "Take notes for me" feature directly from Google Calendar when scheduling or preparing a meeting in Google Meet.

Google Workspace is introducing an enhancement to the Gemini-powered "Take notes for me" feature, allowing event organizers to activate it directly within Google Calendar. This integration simplifies the process of ensuring that meeting notes are automatically generated and shared in Google Meet, freeing participants to fully engage in discussions. The feature aims to provide comprehensive notes for critical meetings without requiring manual activation once the meeting starts.

Meet Quality Tool now shows viewers with 'Testing peering policy'.

The Meet Quality Tool's eCDN table will now represent viewers utilizing the 'Testing peering policy'. Previously, this table only displayed viewers per configured network when the 'Custom Rules' peering policy was in use, improving visibility for administrators using the testing policy.

Google Meet eCDN's 'Random peering policy' renamed to 'Testing peering policy'.

The 'Random peering policy' in Google Meet eCDN has been renamed to 'Testing peering policy'. This policy is intended primarily for testing purposes and is not designed for full performance in production environments.

Google Meet eCDN now supports multiple private IP addresses for matching.

Google Meet eCDN clients can now detect and use all private IP addresses configured on a device's interfaces for matching against custom rules. Previously, only a single IP (prioritizing IPv4) was used. This ensures that the first rule matching any detected private IP addresses will be applied.

Improvements to Google Meet eCDN custom rules for overlapping IP ranges.

Google Meet eCDN is updating how 'Custom Rules' peering policy works, specifically for overlapping IP ranges. The priority for blocking changes is being removed to simplify match determination, where the first matching rule (top-to-bottom) will be applied. This change affects administrators who have defined overlapping IP ranges in their custom rules.

The 'Manage Google Meet hardware and calendars' privilege will no longer grant broad access to all organizational calendars.

To enhance security and clarity, the 'Manage Google Meet hardware and calendars' privilege will cease to provide full read/write access to all Google Calendars across the organization, effective October 15, 2025. This update ensures that administrators solely responsible for Meet hardware management will not automatically have access to sensitive calendar data. While the privilege will still enable assigning calendars to Meet hardware devices, any admins requiring the previous level of calendar control must be separately granted the 'Manage Calendars' privilege before the specified date.

Ask Gemini in Meet provides a personal meeting assistant to summarize discussions, identify action items, and catch up on missed content.

Ask Gemini in Meet is being introduced for select Google Workspace customers to enhance the meeting experience. This feature allows users to summarize ongoing discussions, identify key takeaways and action items, and catch up on content if they joined late (provided "Take Notes for Me" was enabled). User interactions with Ask Gemini are private, and it generates insights using meeting captions, Google Workspace resources, and Google search. No meeting data is stored after the meeting ends. The feature is initially available on desktop, supports English, and will not be available in breakout rooms. Admins have controls to manage access, and meeting hosts can disable it for participants.

Google Meet links will now be added to the location field for invitations sent to users of other calendar apps (e.g., Outlook), and Google Calendar will detect Meet links from external invitations.

With this update, Google Meet links will automatically appear in the location field when a Google Calendar user invites someone using a different calendar application, such as Microsoft Outlook. This change aims to simplify joining Meet conferences for external users by ensuring the link is easily visible and not overlooked in event details. Additionally, Google Calendar will now intelligently detect Google Meet links embedded in the description or location fields of invitations received from other calendar apps, further enhancing the ease of joining meetings and fostering seamless collaboration across different platforms.

Audit log changes for Google Meet hardware settings will now be found under "Application setting" instead of "Chromebox for meetings device setting change".

Starting August 7, 2025, audit logs for specific Google Meet hardware settings like 'Release channel' and 'Alert recipients' will transition from being logged under 'Chromebox for meetings device setting change' to 'Change Application Setting,' 'Create Application Setting,' or 'Delete Application Setting.' This update is part of Google's effort to remove outdated product references and streamline the audit log experience. By August 28, 2025, these logs will solely appear under the new 'Application setting' categories.

Google Meet "Take notes for me" now offers granular sharing controls for meeting hosts.

Google Meet has introduced new sharing controls for the "Take notes for me" feature, allowing meeting hosts and co-hosts to specify the recipients of the meeting notes. Users can now choose to send notes to all invited guests, only invited guests within their organization, or exclusively to hosts and co-hosts. The default setting is "Invited guests in your organization." Once configured, this sharing preference will apply to the specific meeting and any recurring meetings in that series, providing greater flexibility in managing sensitive meeting information.