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March 2025: Google Meet and Google Workspace Update Recap

At the end of March 2025, Google introduced three big Google Meet updates to promote meeting equity and enhance representation in meetings and unveiled a new way to get started in Google Slides to avoid having to stare at a blank presentation. Contextual smart replies in Gmail also rolled out to more people. Read on to discover more about all of these things and what else was new in March.

Continue reading to uncover what’s new; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most.

Google Meet

In March, Google announced that more ✨ Gemini ✨ features are being integrated into Google Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. These features include custom 🖼 background image generation and studio 👀 look, 🔦 lighting and 🎙 sound in Google Meet as well as 💬 "Translate for me" in Google Chat.

A video depicting the Google Meet web interface as the user applies a background to their camera feed. At the start of the video, the user’s background is a plain-coloured wall. They click on “Generate background” after which they enter the prompt, “Modern simple professional space” and they click on the “Professional office” button to further refine their prompt. They pick from six presented options which applies that background to the camera feed that other participants in the call will see.

The custom backgrounds that Gemini generates for Google Meet also received two enhancements in March. They now feature an upgraded image-generation model and new styles that include an 🏢 office, 📚 bookshelf, 🛋 cozy living room, 🏖 tropical beach and more, meaning that the output will better represent your request.

Throughout the month, several Google Meet features gained support for more languages. This includes meeting transcripts and meeting recordings now being available in 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese and 🇰🇷 Korean, as well as the Gemini “Take notes for me” feature coming to calls conducted in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.

The 📆 Google Calendar guest list started rolling out to Google Meet Hardware devices following its initial launch on the web in 2022. The guest list allows you to see a list of invited meeting participants (including ❓ optional guests) who have not yet joined the meeting along with their ✅❌ RSVP status. This can help meeting hosts start calls smoothly and on time without guessing whether someone is running late or not planning to join.

In a big announcement at the end of the month, Google shared information about dynamic layouts, dynamic tiles and face match – three features that all aim to improve the flexibility of your Google Meet experience and enhance meeting equity. The rollout began in the last few days of March, continuing through April and into May.

Dynamic layouts

A short video showing a Google Meet interface. There are five remote participants (three of whom have turned on their cameras), each with a vertical tile. The layout has been adjusted to focus on faces.

Dynamic layouts will bring more flexibility to the video feed tiles in Google Meet, automatically adapting to fill as much screen space as possible with the most interesting video. For instance, Google Meet will prioritise a cropped, vertical feed from remote participants on 🌐 web and 📱 mobile, emphasising faces and removing excess background content. Google Meet will also allow for more variation in tile sizes and shapes to minimise wasted space and allow you to 📌 pin up to six tiles – instead of the current limit of three – to allow you more control over what you see.

Dynamic tiles

A short video showing a Google Meet web interface. At the beginning of the video, there are three video feeds represented as tiles: two remote participants with a tile each and a third tile for a meeting room containing three people. The room feed is highlighted and split into three sections: one for each person, who all now have their own tile.

Dynamic tiles are a feature for Google Meet Hardware in meeting rooms. When three people or fewer occupy a room, Google Meet will automatically crop the room camera’s feed and focus on the participants, with each participant getting their own, separate camera feed in Google Meet instead of sharing the room feed. Remote participants will be able to see each of them more clearly. When someone in that room speaks, they will be automatically highlighted. None of these features of dynamic tiles require new or specialist hardware beyond the qualified room kits.

💡 Only available to Compute-based Google Meet systems at launch. Support will be coming to Appliance mode systems at a later date.

Face match

A short video that starts by showing a laptop in Google Meet companion mode. The video zooms into the top-right corner of the laptop screen where the user wants to check into the meeting and is asked to pick from a list of faces with the question, “Which one is you?” The next shot shows the meeting running on the laptop and the user’s video feed is identified with their name.

When using dynamic tiles in a room, you’ll also be able to identify who you are as an individual. You can already check in with companion mode and face match takes it a step further. When checking in, companion mode will identify the participants in the room and when you indicate who you are, Google Meet will associate your individual tile with your own name.

Google Workspace

Google Chat

💬 Google Chat saw two Gemini-related updates in March. The first update introduces a new “Summarize this file” button which prompts ✨ Gemini ✨ to give you an overview of a Google Docs, Sheets or Slides 📂 file that has been shared in a chat conversation. The summary opens in the Gemini side panel and allows you to get the gist of files without needing to leave the conversation or to open the document in a separate tab.

The second update brings the Gemini side panel in Google Chat to seven additional languages. These languages are: 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.

Google also shared that from May, in conversations with external participants, you may see more or fewer messages as soon as changes are made to the Google Chat retention policy. This means that the conversation creator’s policy will apply to the Chat interface. The change will not impact your organisation’s Vault policies.

Google Docs

A short video of a user working in a Google Docs file titled “About Cymbal Labs”. Underneath the heading at the top of the document, the user types “@summary” and a pop-up menu appears with the “AI Summary” building block option. The user clicks on this option and a summary automatically generated by Gemini is interested into the document as a new section alongside other content. The user clicks the tick icon appearing next to the summary to confirm they would like to insert it into the document.

To make it easier to consume longer documents, a new 🧩 building block was introduced in 📝 Google Docs that summarises content with Gemini. The AI summary block can be quickly inserted into a file as a new section alongside other content and all collaborators can see and edit the summary once it has been generated. There’s also an option to refresh the summary to reflect any changes made to the document. Meanwhile, “Help me create”, which leverages Gemini to help you get started in a blank document faster, now supports an additional seven languages: 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.

In addition, tables, equations and checkboxes in PDFs exported from Google Docs now include accessibility 🏷 tags. These hidden labels help people using assistive technologies, such as screen readers, better understand and navigate more complex files.

In beta, you can now export client-side encrypted Google Docs files as Microsoft Word files, making it easier to move files across platforms whilst ensuring you retain control of the 🔑 encryption keys.

Google Sheets

A new sub-menu in Google Sheets gives you access to more formatting options for your tables, including toggling gridlines, colour options, a condensed view and showing a table footer.

If you’ve got a spreadsheet cell with multiple email addresses, a new update will let you quickly convert all of the email addresses into 👥 people chips.

Google Slides

A short video showing Google Slides in which a user is editing one slide. They have various shapes on the page and they select each of them in turn. When they resize the selection, they demonstrate the new feature in Slides that makes each of the shapes and all of its attributes scale proportionally.

For those times in Google Slides where a layout looks perfect and the only change needed is to resize the objects, the latest update will save you some hassle. The update means you can 🔎 resize all selected objects proportionally at once. Fonts, borders, shadows and other attributes will all scale proportionally with this change when you drag from the corner of the object group selection.

You can now use Gemini within Google Slides in many more languages, letting you write prompts such as summarising content, creating presentations or generating images in all of them. The first update added seven more supported languages and the second update a couple of weeks later added a further 21.

A short video that starts with a blank presentation in Google Slides. The user is scrolling through content in a sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen. The user opens a section called “Key Statistics” and chooses a graph template to insert into their presentation.

Building blocks are coming to Google Slides – in the same way that building blocks in Google Docs help you get started in a document with pre-formatted templates, you’ll be able to pick from a library of content in Slides, such as 🗓️ agendas, 🗣️ quotes, 📈 key statistics and 🖼️ stock images.

💡 Google Slides building blocks are only available if your account language is set to U.S. English.

Google Drive

In Google Drive, you will soon see ✨ Gemini ✨ “nudges” – a faster way to get started with Gemini prompts featuring suggestions for things you can try. Examples include: 📄 learning about a file, 📂 summarising a folder and ✨ learning what else Gemini can do in Drive.

Sticking with Gemini in Google Drive, there were two new prompts added that can help you create new 📄 files and 📂 folders: “Create a new folder” and “Create a new Google Doc, Sheet or Slide”.

Towards the end of the month, another Gemini feature gained support for many more languages. In all, you can now use 20+ languages to interact with PDF content in Google Drive, requesting summaries of the content, asking questions or prompting Gemini to create brand new content – such as study guides – based on the PDFs.

Google Calendar

At the beginning of March, Google announced a change to the way that Google Calendar handles invitations sent to Microsoft Outlook users, making the process more reliable – which benefits Google users when receiving both invitations and responses from Outlook users.

If you receive an ✉ email in Gmail containing event-related information – such as dates, times and locations – Gemini will automatically suggest adding it to your 📆 Google Calendar with a new button.

Gmail

March started with a Gemini extension that brings Salesforce to Gmail, an integration that helps you find relevant Salesforce data or to create a new lead based on the email without leaving your inbox.

In further Gemini-in-Gmail news, “Help me write”, the assistive feature that can write a first draft or polish an existing one, is now available in a further three languages (🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German and 🇮🇹 Italian) whilst contextual smart replies are now rolling out to Google Workspace Business and Enterprise tiers. Previously, contextual smart replies were only available to users who had the Gemini add-on but are now more widely available, providing more users with fully-realised email drafts that better reflect the context of the entire email 🧵 thread.

To unify the experiences, the 📎 attachment menu in the Gmail 📱 mobile app on both Android and iOS is being updated to bring them more in line with each other.

A new beta update for Gmail means that data classification 🏷️ labels will now be applied instantly, providing immediate feedback about potential policy violations before you hit send.

Gemini

A short video of a user demonstrating how to use Canvas in the Gemini app on the web. The user selects the “Canvas” option from the input bar and enters the prompt “Help me write a five minute speech based on my notes from class”. Gemini responds to the user's prompt by generating a speech. The video zooms into the Gemini-generated speech and the user highlights a specific sentence. A vertical bar with three editing tools appears on the right side: "Adjust length" "Change tone," and "Suggest edits".

Canvas is a whole new way to use Gemini in the standalone app. It is a dedicated workspace for creating and editing 📄 documents or 🧑‍💻 code, even allowing you to run the code within Canvas. Google also announced that the popular NotebookLM feature, 🎙️ Audio Overview, is coming over to the Gemini app. Audio Overview uses your content to generate AI-hosted, podcast-like audio discussions.

Within the Gemini app, 💎 Gems and 📚 Deep Research are both becoming available to more tiers of Google Workspace in the Gemini app, allowing more people to access both of these features. Meanwhile, what were previously known as 🧩 “extensions” in the Gemini app are now called “apps”.

More Gemini models are becoming available in the Gemini app too. Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (already available on web) is now accessible on mobile devices whilst Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, Google’s most intelligent model to date, is accessible on both web and mobile. Additionally, mobile users can now upload files from their phone’s local storage to provide additional context to queries.

In March, Google added support to Gemini for many more languages across Google Workspace applications. In addition to updates specific to Meet, Chat, Slides and Drive, the Gemini side panel available across Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail also gained support for Greek, Catalan, Indonesian and Malay.

NotebookLM

NotebookLM has added support for 🧠🗺️ mind maps and choosing your output language. Interactive mind maps will help draw connections between different areas of a topic that could highlight connections, whilst the output language selector lets you request that NotebookLM generate the content in one of 35+ languages so that you can read the content in your preferred language.

💡 Audio Overviews can still only be generated in English.

Google Vids

A short video of a user in Google Vids. The video begins with the user entering a prompt that reads “Create a recap video on recent gen z retail highlights” and links to a Google Doc titled “Gen Z Market Research Report [Cymbal]”. After clicking “Next”, Gemini responds to the user’s prompt by providing an outline for the video. The user proceeds by clicking “Create the draft video” and after several seconds Gemini provides a video draft complete with automatically-generated scenes, a script and AI voiceover

When using the ✨ Gemini ✨ “Help me create” feature in Google Vids, Gemini will soon simultaneously generate 🎬 scenes, AI 🗣 voiceovers and 📜 scripts in one step. This means you can get a complete video draft, including narration for each scene of your video based on the AI-suggested script, after clicking “Help me create”. You no longer have to add voiceovers as a separate step. Once Gemini has generated your video draft, you can customise it as needed. This includes editing the suggested scripts and choosing from a variety of AI voiceovers with different pitches and tones, such as an 📚 educator, 💡 explainer and 🏆 coach.

Google Admin Panel

There were new updates announced for admins in the middle of the month too. Firstly, a new beta makes it possible to convert 🔒 client-side encrypted documents after a Vault or Takeout export, meaning you can convert them to Microsoft Word files even after exporting them from Workspace. Secondly, it is now possible to set Context-Aware Access policies to govern how and when your users can access 📓 NotebookLM. Lastly, similar to logs for events relating to Drive, Chat or Chrome, admins will be able to see snippets of Gmail content that triggered a DLP rule which can aid in investigating what happened.

AppSheet

As of the middle of March, AppSheet apps that require users to sign in can now be embedded directly into a 💻 Google Sites page. Around the same time, Google introduced AppSheet User Pass, a new licensing model for AppSheet apps, that allows admins to purchase a pool of monthly access passes that are automatically consumed by users when they access eligible apps.

Catch up on February’s updates

Did you miss February’s updates? You can see everything that happened across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our February 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.

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