December 2025: Google Meet and Google Workspace Update Recap

Google Meet

The previously-announced new UI for ChromeOS-based Google Meet Hardware began rolling out at the start of December. Touch controllers, such as the MIMO Myst, Logitech Tap and Series One Touch Controller, will now show a 🌒 dark mode interface that resembles the Google Meet 🌐 web and 📱 mobile interfaces and easier access to frequently-used features.

To improve accessibility for viewers joining a 📹 Google Meet livestream from their 📱 mobile, Google added the ability to select your own individual preferred language for translated captions. You’ll have the the option to switch between different 🌍 languages during the livestream for even more flexibility. Additionally, translated captions in Meet now also support 🇨🇳 Cantonese.

Now, you’ll have more control over who watches your 📹 Google Meet livestreams. Specifically, hosts will be able to choose to ✅ invite external users outside your own domain or to ❌ limit in-domain access to only specific users or groups.

A new feature, called ”Connect Room”, was released into Early Preview. This allows you to launch a Google Meet call from your laptop in an unbooked meeting room. When opening the Google Meet call’s green room on your 💻 laptop, the meeting room will use 🔊 ultrasound proximity detection to present you with this new option. Upon 🖱️ clicking, it will have the meeting room 📞 join the call, automatically ✅ book the room (if enabled) and check you in with your laptop in 👥 companion mode.

Since last month, 🖼️ picture-in-picture mode in Google Meet – which displays the call in a small, 🪟 floating window – will now open automatically when you start 🧑‍💻 sharing your screen. This is helpful for making sure you can still see your audience without any additional manual steps. You’ll also get to select if and when picture-in-picture opens, with a choice between ❌ never, ✅ always, only when 🔁 tab switching or only when 🖥️ screensharing.

To help you meet 📑 regulatory requirements, Google introduced Google Meet Compliance Recording, a feature that will automatically 🔴 record meetings and capture 📜 transcripts for specific users or groups. This is useful in regulated environments, such as financial industries. Unlike user-initiated recordings, compliance recordings are stored immutably in specific Google Cloud Storage buckets to ensure regulatory compliance.

Announced and launched in one go in mid-December, Google Meet now supports 🎶 stereo audio. When you share audio from a 🌐 web browser that has both left and right channels, recipients will receive stereo audio on supported devices, helping to keep the audio experience as intended.

On the same day, Google also announced 🤫 Silent Test Mode to help admins who are deploying eCDN to reduce bandwidth usage when large numbers of people on the network join the same livestream. Silent Test Mode runs silently in the background, without impacting the ongoing livestream experience for viewers, to collect data on how eCDN would perform, letting you try various configurations to see which one would work best for you before you ever deploy it in a real-world scenario.

Google also began rolling out the ability to share your device 🔊 audio whilst presenting a specific 🪟 window or 🖥️ entire screen in a Google Meet call. Previously, you could only share audio when presenting a tab – now you’ll have more flexibility to share various audio content, in the way you want, and not lose the audio or generate any echoes.

Google Workspace

Google Chat

At the start of December, Google began rolling out a new setting for 🚀🧑‍💻 Space admins, enabling them to block anyone from submitting requests to join their Google Chat space. This lets admins tighten access and set expectations that the requested space isn’t joinable.

Later in the month, Google added another setting in Chat that allows you to block incoming Chat requests for 👥 direct messages and 🚀 spaces from unknown senders. If enabled, it will only impact messages from people outside your organisation who are not in your 📙 contacts and with whom you have not previously interacted. Any requests from these users will be automatically diverted to your spam folder.

The ability to 🕐 schedule messages in Google Chat was launched in the middle of December, allowing you to send them at a later and more convenient time – up to 120 days in the future. There’s a new Draft shortcut in the left side panel that will help you to manage all of your scheduled messages from one place, where you can ✏️ edit, 📅 reschedule or ❌ cancel them as needed. You can schedule any message that you would normally send, including ones that are 🗨️ quote-replies, in 🧵 threaded conversations and that contain media, such as attached 🖼️ images or 🔗 in-line links.

Last month, Google brought the Feeds app to Chat, an app that will automatically send 🗞️ news sources directly into your 💬 Chat spaces without any manual programming. It will let you configure RSS feeds to deliver the latest entries straight to your space, helping to keep your team informed. You can add multiple sources to a Google Chat space, letting you stay up to date across a range of topics and be notified when there is something new to 📖 read.

Gmail

You can now quickly 📨 forward an email from Gmail directly to Google Chat. This allows you to initiate a chat from a Gmail 🧵 thread with the existing email 👥 recipients, a subset or a new group. The integration creates a space to discuss the email whilst making sure everyone has access to it.

When applying 🔐 data loss prevention (DLP) rules in Gmail, you’ll now have the option to create a rule that adds a 💬 header or footer message to ✉️ emails. This helps ensure that people are aware of the sensitivity of the contents. The header and footer will be visible on both 📱 mobile and 🌐 web and even to external users. Admins have the ability to customise the messages – adding 🔗 links and other 📝 relevant information – to help recipients follow any 🔑 security guidelines.

Google Drive

Expanding on “nudges”, Gemini in Google Drive will now proactively provide summaries of 📂 folder contents as you’re 🕵️ browsing Drive. This makes it faster and easier to understand what’s inside the folder without having to open each file individually. By pressing ✨ “Explore with Gemini”, you can then get a more 📝 detailed summary or ask follow-up questions.

Several new features were added last month to the the viewing experience of 📄 PDFs, 📹 videos, 🖼️ images and 🔊 audio files in Google Drive when opening the files in a new tab on the 🌐 web. This includes a new 📂 file menu and ⚒️ toolbar, as well as improved 🔎 zooming capabilities for PDFs, thumbnail navigation and more.

NotebookLM

Google began rolling out the ability to turn your sources into structured Data Tables in 📓 NotebookLM, helping you to better organise the information from your sources. For instance, you could turn 📜 meeting transcripts into a table of action items, 👷 build a competitor comparison table and more. Having the sources in a structured format also makes it easier to export the data directly to Google Sheets for further 📊 analysis.

Google Vids

🤖 AI avatars in Google Vids received an upgrade last month. The avatars are now powered by Veo 3.1, Google's latest video generation model. With this model, you’ll be able to create avatars even faster and notice that they have 👄 smoother lip-syncing, 😆 heightened facial expressions and 🖼️ steadier framing.

Google Voice

A 📞 call queuing feature was added to Google Voice Standard and Premier tiers during December. This means that, when every member of a ring group is busy, the next caller will no longer be sent straight to 🗣️📨 voicemail – they’ll now be able to wait in a queue for the next available person to take the call. Admins can also configure queue settings for 🎶 music, 👥 maximum queue length and ⌛ queue time as well as the ⏲️ length of break for agents between ending a call and receiving the next one.

Google Vault

👥 Multi-party approvals (MPA) were extended to Google Vault. Specifically, if enabled, when an admin requests for a search query to be exported, another admin must ✅ approve the action before it can be executed. This acts as another layer of 🔐 security to protect sensitive data that may be located inside the vault.

Gemini

Gemini 3 Flash was introduced to the Gemini app towards the end of the year. When choosing a model for your query in the Gemini app, Gemini 3 Flash will be the model at work for the 🏃 “Fast” and 🧠 “Thinking” options. For more advanced requirements, such as 🧮 maths and 🧑‍💻 coding, Gemini 3 Pro remains an option.

Workspace Studio

Google launched Google Workspace Studio last month, a new platform to create, manage and share 🤖 AI agents that can automate your work across the Workspace ecosystem. It had previously been called Workspace Flows during the beta phase. Here, you’ll be able to 🎨 design agents using AI, 👥 share and copy agents within teams, 🔀 connect agents to third-party apps and more.

Google AI Ultra

As of December, the 📓 NotebookLM experience was upgraded for Google AI Ultra subscribers. Enhancements included greater usage limits, including the largest 🗒️ notebook size, higher limits for 🎙️ Audio Overviews and 📹 Video Overviews, access to the latest ✨ Gemini models and 1️⃣ priority access to features.

Catch up on November’s updates

Do you want to see what happened in November? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our November 2025 recap.

If you want to stay up-to-date on all of the latest news throughout the month, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.