In July 2026, Google Meet and Google Workspace received a variety of new updates and features, including a new way to communicate with external people in 💬 Google Chat, more granular control over the way AI avatars and voiceovers sound in 📹 Google Vids, a new privacy setting that keeps your private events hidden when sharing a 📅 Google Calendar and more.
Continue reading to uncover what else is new; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most.
Google Meet
In July, Pexip introduced another way for you to join third-party calls from Google Meet Hardware, enabling all Google Meet Hardware to support 📞 SIP calling. This new capability will allow you to join scheduled or ad-hoc calls through SIP as well as navigate menus and in-call controls, such as 🙋 hand-raising, with DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency).
💡 Note: a Pexip licence is required to enable calls via SIP. Contact us here to enquire.
To help keep 📈 track of room usage rates across your entire Google Meet Hardware fleet, occupancy data from Neat was integrated into the 🧑💻 Google admin panel last month. This means that there is now one central place to track key metrics across Neat and existing Compute-based room systems. You can see metrics such as average time spent in a meeting room, what size meeting room is most frequently booked and more. These data enable you to gain deeper insights into your meeting room needs so that you can make informed decisions to optimise your spaces based on the behaviour of people who actually use them.
💡 Explore the range of Neat room solutions here.
In the middle of the month, Google updated how Google Meet Hardware 📋 user feedback is submitted and reported, making it easier for you to send detailed feedback from an underperforming room or to view those reports as an admin. The new interface surfaces relevant options depending on the meeting room’s 📞 call status, including issues during a call, before joining a call or during a livestream. For example, you could report 📹 video quality issues during a call or 🔊 audio problems during a livestream. To more effectively address troublesome rooms and manage the health of your fleet, the generated reports now have more prominence in the Google admin panel. Here, admins can see details such as timestamps of a device’s most recent reports and cumulative count of reports filed within a 28-day time period.
A new setting for ✍️ “Take notes for me” in 📹 Google Meet began rolling out in July – a configuration that will trigger the ✨ Gemini notetaking feature to automatically capture notes for meetings with three or more participants. “Take notes for me” is valuable for times when you need to refer back to 🔑 important details or 📋 agreed action items after the call has ended. Admins will be able to configure the new setting to be on by default across the organisation. Later in the year, there’ll be an individual setting for users allowing you to configure the setting for yourself. When enabled, it means that Gemini will always automatically capture 📝 notes, ❓ decisions and 👣 next steps anytime your meeting includes three or more people.
💡 Note: whether this setting will be on by default varies by your Google Workspace tier. It’s recommended that you review your settings before 21st September 2026.
Towards the end of the month, a redesigned Google Meet 🏡 homepage on the 🌐 web was introduced. The new-look interface lets you access all of your meeting resources from one place, making it easier to find what you need before or after a meeting, with greater visibility of your meeting schedule, stretching further backwards and forwards compared with the previous today-only design. The refreshed layout includes 🔗 calendar attachments for upcoming calls, 📂 meeting artefacts from previous calls as well as the ability to see your 🗓️ schedule of upcoming and past meetings, navigable with the new week and month views.
To make meeting artefacts, such as 📝 meeting notes, 📜 transcripts and 🔴 recordings, even more accessible and easier to find, the generated files will be stored in a new 📂 “Google Meet” folder within My Drive for both hosts and meeting attendees with access. Instead of separate copies, attendees will see 🔗 shortcuts in their Drive that link directly to the artefacts files stored in the host's Drive. Files will be automatically 📑 organised into meeting-specific subfolders and any existing “Meet Recordings” folders will be renamed to “Legacy Meet Recordings” and moved to the new “Google Meet” folder.
💡To learn more about meeting artefacts, check out our detailed guide here.
New admin controls rolled out at the end of the month in advance of a new Google Meet feature. 🧑💻 Admins now have a window to prepare your organisational settings for 🖼️ screenshots in Google Meet notes, deciding whether it can always be enabled or only when the call is being recorded. Announced right at the beginning of August, screenshots will start appearing in 📝 Gemini-generated meeting notes (Take notes for me), providing important, visual context of what was being discussed. The admin controls were available right away.
Google Workspace
Gmail
In the middle of the month, ✍️ “Help me write” in ✉️ Gmail was enhanced to support custom instructions. In addition to having Gemini 💅 Polish, 💼 Formalise and ⏬ Shorten your drafted email, you can request more bespoke edits by providing Gemini with detailed instructions on how exactly to refine your draft. This helps you to receive the outcome you want. New ↩️ “Undo” and ↪️ “Redo” buttons were also added to make it easier to switch back and forth between the Gemini-generated drafts.
One of the month’s last updates will show you a 🚩 warning if you are about to reply-all in a thread where you were blind-copied (bcc), providing a timely reminder that sending the email will reveal your 🕵 previously-incognito presence in the thread.
Google Chat
In July, Google began rolling out the ability to invite external participants to group chats in Google Chat by simply adding their ✉️ email address. This automatically sends an invitation to them by email and provides another way for you to collaborate with 👥 multiple people outside your organisation that doesn’t require you to create a whole new 🚀 Space. All group chats with external members will be clearly labelled with a 🛡️ badge, acting as a reminder to be cautious of sharing any potentially 🔐 sensitive information.
Google Docs
Last month, Gemini’s latest 🖌️ “Help me create” and ✍️ “Help me write” capabilities within 📄 Google Docs gained support for 11 additional languages, including 🇩🇰 Danish, 🇲🇾 Malay and 🇸🇪 Swedish. This enables you to utilise the features in many more languages and create fully-formatted documents from scratch, make document-wide edits with a single prompt and more. Gemini’s latest capabilities are powered by Workspace Intelligence, allowing Gemini to pull data from other Workspace apps – including 🗄️ Drive, 💬 Chat and ✉️ Gmail – and the 🌐 web to provide context and ground its responses.
✨ Gemini also gained some additional capabilities in Google Docs towards the end of July. The first of these is being able to interact with comments, unlocking features like summarising existing comment threads, adding new comments, drafting replies to comments or suggesting edits to your document that incorporate comments that have been written.
The second new Gemini feature in Google Docs is that you can now use it to generate or edit visuals in your document, including 🖼️ pictures and infographics. You can create or modify multiple visuals with a single prompt, making it easier to make relevant images without needing to interrupt your flow or switch to another application.
Google Sheets
In order to enhance the visualisation of data in Google Sheets, at the start of the month Google introduced full support for the importation of 📊 3D bar charts from Microsoft Excel. This means that your 3D visuals can now retain their original 🎨 design during the import process instead of being turned into 2D graphics that lose depth and style.
A week later, you could start using Fill with Gemini in Google Sheets in an additional additional 11 languages, including 🇮🇩 Indonesian, 🇨🇳 Mandarin, 🇹🇷 Turkish and more. Fill with Gemini helps you to enter data faster into Sheets by intelligently predicting and populating cell values. Gemini will do this by 🕵️ identifying patterns in your existing data or by following a custom prompt. For instance, Gemini could automatically summarise information, categorise data or analyse the sentiment of text.
Google then made it easier to create combo charts (📊 bar charts and 📈 line charts) in Google Sheets. Once rolled out, you'll be able to plot data that consists of different metrics and scales on a single chart without having to manually configure the axes. Sheets will also be able to preserve combo charts imported from Microsoft Excel files so that the secondary axis no longer disappears during the import process.
Google Sheets will now also support ☔ scatter plots with multiple x-series, allowing you to create those graphs in Google Sheets and to import them from Microsoft Excel files whilst preserving formatting.
Google Calendar
During the first week of the month, a new “Make changes (see private events as free/busy)” privacy setting in 📆 Google Calendar was introduced. The new setting lets you grant delegates edit access to your calendar without extending that access to 🔒 private events. Your delegate, someone who is managing events on your calendar for you, will be able to 🎨 create, ✏️ edit and ❌ delete events as normal but private events will be kept 🛡️ private, visible only to the delegate as free or busy and they will not be able to move or remove the event. Additionally, recurring events will now adopt the strictest 👀 visibility setting of any individual event in the series; this means that if any of the events are marked as private, the entire series will be marked as private.
You will now also be able to see a person’s delegates when viewing an event’s guest list, making it easier to contact the right person about scheduling a meeting.
As announced at the end of the month, there will be new options to give you more control over how Google Calendar events are displayed on 🖥️ larger screens. The new density settings – responsive to your screen; comfortable; compact – let you tailor your experience to something that works best for you.
Google Forms
The end of the month saw a new 📋 Google Forms feature: Gemini can now generate quizzes for you, taking advantage of different question types and appropriate settings. Content can always be reviewed and edited before being used.
Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)
In the middle of July, Google’s AI-powered research assistant, 📓 NotebookLM, was renamed to ✨ Gemini Notebook. It’s the same tool with a new name and new logo. To ensure a seamless transition, any existing 🔗 links to your 📚 notebooks will automatically redirect to their new home. For Google AI Ultra and Google Workspace AI Expanded Access accounts, this change also introduces a new feature: a secure cloud computer within every notebook, enabling data analysis that’s grounded in your sources.
Google Vids
Last month, Google rolled out additional language support for converting your Google Slides presentations to videos using Google Vids. Previously only available in English, you can now leverage the feature to generate videos with 🗣️ voiceovers, 🎵 background music and ↪️ animations based on presentations in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.
A little later in the month you were able to start directing the 😃 emotional delivery, ⏩ pacing and 🔊 sound effects of 🧑🦱 AI avatars and 🗣️ voiceovers within Google Vids. You can do so by typing your instructions within square brackets directly into the 📜 script, such as “[excitedly]” or “[whispers]”, which will instantly change how the avatar speaks at specific moments. This helps to make the video more engaging for your audience. Alternatively, you can utilise the 📑 dropdown audio tags menu to browse options and quickly 🖱️ select the exact emotional tone, speaking pace or sound effect you want. If you’re looking to save time, you can use the “Apply audio tags” button which will let Gemini automatically insert appropriate tags throughout your script based on content and context.
As of last month, Google Vids now uses the ✨ Gemini Omni video generation model. Omni unlocks new capabilities within Vids, allowing you to create higher-quality videos and make a wider range of simple video edits using 💬 text prompts. With Omni, you can also create and use your very own 🧑 personal avatar for videos. The avatars are generated based on a secure 🔴 recording of your face and voice and let you create videos with yourself as the 🎤 host without needing as much studio time.
Catch up on June’s updates
Do you want to see what happened in June? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our June 2026 recap.
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