February 2025 brought a variety of helpful updates and features to Google Meet and Google Workspace. Now, you can scroll captions in Meet, create polls and pin messages in Chat, get Gemini to automatically capture next steps discussed in a meeting and much more.
Continue reading to uncover what’s new; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most.
Google Meet
At the start of February, a new setting was introduced in Google Meet that lets you choose how screen readers announce 😃 in-meeting reactions. Specifically, there are now four options: 🔇 “Don’t announce reactions”, 🎵 “Play a sound for all reactions”, 👍 “Announce all reactions” and 🗣 “Announce all reactions and senders”. This makes meetings more accessible by allowing you to customise your experience to your specific needs and preferences.
Google also announced that live 💬 captions – and translated captions – in Google Meet are becoming 🖱 scrollable. This means you can go back and review the last ⏲ 30 minutes of conversation at your own pace. Scrolling back to see what was previously said lets you easily catch up on missed information or revisit key points without interrupting the flow of the meeting or asking the speaker to repeat themselves.
The Gemini 📝 “Take notes for me” feature in Google Meet received two enhancements in the month: capturing next steps and including citations. Gemini automatically identifying and capturing next steps that are discussed in meetings ensures that important action items aren’t forgotten and keeps everyone aligned on who’s following up on which points after the call. The suggested next steps are organised in a dedicated section of the automatically-generated meeting notes Google Doc, where you can 👀 review, ✍ edit and 👤 assign them to specific participants.
Citations appear as clickable timestamps in the meeting notes document and link to the exact moment in the meeting transcript where the topic was discussed. This allows you to gain deeper context behind the Gemini note and verify information. As part of this update, the meeting transcript is now conveniently located in a separate tab within the same meeting notes document for easy access.
💡 Learn more about “Take notes for me”, along with other Gemini features in Google Meet, here.
For Google Meet on mobile, Google shared that the layout of meeting controls is being reorganised to make navigation faster and more intuitive. This includes moving 😀 emoji reactions, the ✋ hand-raise feature, the 📞 end call button and other controls. These changes are purely visual and will not affect how the features themselves work.
Google Workspace
Google Chat
Polling arrived in Google Chat, making it even easier to collect feedback from people, whether that be deciding what 🕧 time to have an important meeting or where to host the team 🍜 lunch. Available in all Chat conversation types – direct messages, group messages and spaces – polls encourage everyone to participate in the decision-making process without back-and-forth messages cluttering the message stream. You can create multiple-choice or anonymous polls and results are displayed in real-time so that everyone can easily see the current standings.
The ability to 📌 pin Google Chat messages was also introduced through the new Board tab. The Board tab enables you to keep relevant files, links and resources close at hand in any conversation, letting all participants reference the bulletin board. It can be kept open as a side panel, making it easy to reference 💬 messages or 📁 resources that you or someone else have pinned.
Additionally, you can now ✍ rename any new or existing group messages in Google Chat for easier identification. This lets you assign a more meaningful and descriptive title, instead of the default name being a list of participant names, making it quicker to find the right conversation when needed.
✨ Gemini-powered summaries of Google Chat conversations can be a powerful way to quickly catch up on a missed conversation. Until now, they’ve only been available for unread conversations. Following an update in February, you can now lean on Gemini to provide a summary of a conversation from the 🏡 Home view – even if you’d previously marked the conversation as read. Gemini can also summarise direct messages with this update, in addition to spaces and group messages.
When composing a 💬 message in Google Chat using Markdown, you will see 🖌️ styling be applied in real-time rather than needing to wait until after you’ve sent the message. You will also be able to use 🧑💻 code formatting.
Does your team use HubSpot? A new integration means you can get notifications and interact with your HubSpot content directly in Google Chat, reducing the need for context-switching.
Two 🧑💻 developer-related updates were released during the month. The first update introduces quick commands. This allows developers to set up their Google Chat apps so that users can communicate with the app and trigger actions directly from a conversation without having to type or remember a specific slash command.
The second update enables validation rules to be added to form fields in Google Chat app cards and Google Workspace add-ons. This means developers can build in checks to ensure that the information users enter is in the correct format and that all required fields are filled before submission.
Google Docs
Cover images in Google Docs received several improvements to help you customise your documents further. You can now add images from more sources (web, Google Drive, Google Photos or by URL), access an expanded stock photo library and see placeholder images when first inserting a cover image.
Google Sheets
Speed improvements are now available for common actions in 📊 Google Sheets, such as pasting data between spreadsheets and setting up filters, to improve productivity and help you complete tasks faster. This builds on the 2024 update where calculations in Google Sheets became twice as fast.
A “Convert to people chips” tool has also arrived, allowing you to bulk convert a column of email addresses into interactive 👤🍟 people chips with a single click. Plus, there are now more options for how people chips appear in your spreadsheet. In addition to the default format, you can choose to display the contact’s last name first or simply show their email address.
💡 You can also bulk convert data into dropdown chips with the “Convert to dropdown chips” suggestion in Google Sheets.
Google Drive
Video 💬 transcripts were introduced in Google Drive, making 📽 video content more accessible and easier to search and navigate. The transcripts will appear in a sidebar next to the video player in Drive and highlight what’s currently being said so that you can easily follow along. You can also click on any part of the transcript or use the transcript search function to jump to a specific moment in the video.
Gmail
When asking Gemini questions about your inbox using the Gmail Q&A feature on 📱 mobile, you can now insert Gemini’s responses directly into your email draft in just a single tap, helping you save time and write messages faster.
Gmail data classification labels have also expanded to mobile devices, meaning you can now categorise emails based on criteria such as 🛡 sensitivity or ✅ status and apply security policies to protect important information on both web and mobile.
Admins can now also configure data loss prevention (DLP) rules in ✉ Gmail to protect sensitive information from accidentally leaving the organisation, as this feature has become more widely available.
Google Calendar
The improved syncing experience between 📆 Google Calendar and third-party calendar services, such as Outlook, started rolling out more widely following its beta release in 2024. Events will sync more accurately and there will be better possibilities to filter them out of your inbox.
The “Make changes to events” permission, which allows you to create and edit events on a shared Google Calendar, was also updated to let you see all 👥 members of the shared calendar. This means that when you create a new event, you’ll know exactly who you’re sharing it with, ensuring full transparency.
Google Voice
Towards the end of the month, call delegation was introduced in 📞 Google Voice. This allows assigned delegates to manage calls on behalf of colleagues, including answering and placing calls, transferring calls and listening to voicemail messages.
In further Google Voice news, the availability of SIP Link was expanded to cover an additional 15 countries, including 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇭🇰 Hong Kong, 🇫🇮 Finland, 🇷🇴 Romania and 🇵🇪 Peru.
Google Admin panel
Two Google Admin panel migration tools that were previously available in open beta began rolling out more widely in February. The first tool enables the migration of files from Microsoft OneDrive to Google Drive for up to 100 users at a time and has since gained new settings, including the ability to exclude specific file formats. The second tool simplifies moving conversations from Microsoft Teams channels to Google Chat spaces, eliminating the need for third-party software. Both of these tools are now available.
Google Groups
To make it easier to prioritise important discussions, 👥 Google Groups now lets content moderators 📌 pin conversations to the top of the Groups list so all members can easily see and access them. This can be particularly useful in groups that have a high volume of activity where important information can get lost.
AppSheet
An improved image ✍ annotation experience is now available for AppSheet apps on 📱 Android devices, enabling developers to build apps where users can mark up images with shapes and text to highlight specific details.
Gemini
You can now ask ✨ Gemini ✨ to generate images of people. Available in the standalone app, the side panel of various Google Workspace apps and through features such as “Help me create” in Docs, this helps you create more realistic and engaging visuals for presentations, documents and other projects.
The Gemini side panel is also gaining support for seventeen additional languages. This means you can chat with Gemini across various Google Workspace apps and get help with summarising, analysing and generating content in 🇨🇳 Chinese, 🇨🇿 Czech, 🇳🇴 Norwegian, 🇵🇱 Polish, 🇸🇪 Swedish, 🇹🇭 Thai, 🇻🇳 Vietnamese and many other languages.
A new dropdown menu started rolling out in the Gemini app, allowing you to choose between the different AI models to tailor your experience and select the model best suited for specific tasks, including experimental models and ones that employ Deep Research. The availability of different models depends on your organisation’s tier of Google Workspace.
NotebookLM
Early in the month, Google announced that its AI-powered research assistant, 📓 NotebookLM, and its enhanced version, ➕ NotebookLM Plus, will be directly integrated into Google Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. Previously offered as an additional service, this means NotebookLM and NotebookLM Plus are now included as part of Google Workspace and covered under the same terms of service as Gmail, Drive and other applications.
💡 NotebookLM allows you to upload sources and it can then answer questions about those sources, create 🎓 study guides, 🎙 Audio Overviews and more. Access to NotebookLM or NotebookLM Plus will depend on your Workspace plan.
Google Vids
February saw two features get announced for Google Vids. Firstly, the choice of AI voiceover was expanded significantly with the addition of options such as an educator, explainer and coach, amongst more, each with differing energy levels and pitches. Secondly, you can soon add 🔁 looping animations to your creations in Google Vids.
Catch up on January’s updates
From several improvements to the interoperability experience on Google Meet Hardware to more options for digital signage in meeting rooms and the addition of Gemini in Google Workspace plans, January saw many updates across Google Meet and Workspace. Catch up on these announcements, and explore others that you may have missed, in our January 2025 update recap.