New features introduced to Google Meet and Google Workspace in March include a new “Meeting” section in 💬 Google Chat (for all of your meeting conversations), support for 🗓️ group scheduling using Gemini in ✉️ Gmail, the ability to share conversations from the ✨ Gemini app and to create 🎥 Cinematic Video Overviews in 📓 NotebookLM.
Continue reading to uncover what else is new; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most.
Google Meet
At the start of the month, Google began linking all Google Meet codes to their original 📅 Google Calendar event in order to enhance the predictability and 🔐 security of your meeting artefacts. Reusing or manually pasting old meeting codes into new calendar events will now trigger a warning message, notifying you that artefacts such as 📄 meeting recordings, 📝 AI notes and 💬 chats will only be sent to the original event’s guest list. The message will also include which of the guests will be able to join the call automatically without host approval.
A new 🧑💻 admin setting for continuous meeting chat – the feature that integrates your 📹 Google Meet conversations with Google Chat – was also added last month. The new ⚙️ setting enables admins to turn the feature ✅ on or ❌ off by default for the whole organisation or for specific groups. Additionally, admins will also be able to configure whether hosts can ✏️ modify these default settings for each of their meetings to allow them more flexibility.
Google also introduced a new “Device ID” to replace the “Legacy ID” currently used for Google Meet Hardware. As it continues to roll out, you may notice different 🏷️ IDs associated with the same device across the admin panel, including within 📑 audit logs, 📝 device details, 🔗 device-keyed URLs and other places. The Legacy ID will no longer be supported after October.
Towards the end of the month, guests who ✊ “knock” and try to join a 📹 Google Meet call will now be automatically sorted into two separate queues, instead of one big queue, by the new 🛡️ safeguarded admission flow. One queue will show confirmed users where the default action is to allow them entry; the other 🚩 flags anyone who’s potentially a greater risk and whose admission might need review. For the people sorted into the new queue, the default action will be to ❌ deny them entry, though as the host you can still choose to let them in. This improves the default 🔐 security of the call whilst making it faster for hosts to manage knocking requests.
Google Meet will also soon be able to automatically detect what language is being 🗣️ spoken during a meeting. If the language 🕵️ detected differs from the default language set for the meeting, you’ll be prompted once to change it so that all meeting artefacts, including 📜 meeting transcripts, 📝 summarised notes and 💬 recorded captions, can be recorded accurately.
Google Workspace
Google Chat
As of the first week of March, 🧑💻 app developers could start connecting dropdown menus in 💬 Google Chat apps to dynamic, external data sources. This means that you’ll now be able to use 🔎✍️ search-as-you-type for both static and remote data sources to quickly query and filter options which helps you save time 🖱️ scrolling through long lists and avoids any ⌛ latency issues associated with loading large static lists.
Then, towards end of the month, to make it quicker and easier to locate your 📷 Google Meet conversations in 💬 Google Chat, Google introduced an option for you to create a new dedicated “Meetings” section within the conversation list. The new section enables you to separate your meeting conversations from your 👥 Direct Messages and 🚀 Spaces. Once created, all of your current and future meeting chats will be automatically added to the Meetings section but can be individually moved into custom sections if desired.
💡 Note: the Meetings section in Chat will be off by default and will require manual creation. When it is first available to you, you will be asked if you want to create the Meetings section.
At the end of the month, Google announced the availability of 👥 guest accounts in Google Workspace, a feature that allows non-Workspace users to join your conversations in Google Chat. When you invite an external user via Chat, a dedicated guest account will be automatically generated for them within your organisation which allows them to seamlessly 💬 chat, 📹 join Google Meet calls and ✏️ collaborate on Docs, Slides and Sheets files. To ensure security, these guests will be marked with a teal “external” label.
💡 Note: external users with guest accounts cannot create or own new files in Google Drive. Also, admins are able to restrict who can invite guest accounts within your organisation.
Gmail
Previously limited to scheduling meetings between two people, Gemini’s “Help me schedule” in ✉️ Gmail can now support group scheduling. When scheduling a time to meet via email, both the sender and recipient can 🕵️ cross-reference multiple colleagues’ calendars at once to quickly find times that work for the whole group. Once an available slot is chosen, the 📅 calendar invitation is sent immediately. Whilst the invitation defaults to including everyone in the email thread, you’re still able ✏️ edit the guest list if needed.
💡 Note: “Help me schedule” can only analyse calendars that have been shared with you.
Google Drive
By the end of the month, 🔎 ransomware detection and 📂 file restoration left beta and were made generally available in Google Drive. By using AI, Drive will be able to 🕵️ detect an attack and help you recover your data. If ransomware is detected, file syncing in Google Drive for desktop will be ⏸️ paused and admins will be 🔔 alerted. If any files are 🦠 infected, you can use the bulk-restoration tool to revert affected documents. Google says that the tools can now detect more types of ransomware, faster, compared with the beta period.
Google Calendar
Last month, an update to Google Calendar 🔔 email notifications regarding meeting ✏️ changes or ❌ cancellations made by delegates meant that notifications for event modifications will now be sent in the principal’s name rather than the delegate's name. This helps reduce any confusion about who is hosting the meeting. Previously, only the initial invitation would include the principal’s name and subsequent changes would show the name of the account making those changes.
Then, in order to help you save time assigning or unassigning 🗓️ calendars for Google Meet Hardware devices, last month Google rolled out a new feature that lets you upload a single 📂 CSV file to update Google Calendar assignments for multiple devices at once.
💡 Note: only personal calendars can be assigned to multiple devices; a room calendar resource can only be assigned to one device at a time.
A day later, Google Calendar on the 🌐 web was updated so that your calendar will now automatically 🔎 scale and ↔️ fill the space of large, high-resolution monitors. The view will focus on prioritising the most relevant hours of your day which should make it easier to 📖 read events whilst minimising the whitespace on your screen.
Additionally, in Google Calendar on the web, you’ll soon be able to select a 🌍 city or country’s 🕝 time zone by typing it into a 🔎 search bar rather than having to 🖱️ scroll through a long list. The search bar will appear any time you can set a time zone in Google Calendar, including when scheduling a meeting, setting a secondary time zone or configuring the world clock.
Google previously announced that there would be significant changes to the ownership of secondary calendars in 📅 Google Calendar. Specifically, when a user’s account is deleted, any secondary calendars they own will also be deleted unless ownership is transferred to another in their organisation. In order to help manage this transition, at the end of last month Google announced that they will be pushing back the deadline to 5th October 2026 and launching a new API endpoint in June that allows developers to programmatically transfer the ownership of secondary calendars. This should help to ensure that important calendars aren’t accidentally permanently deleted.
Gemini
At the start of the month, Google introduced the ability to generate 🔗 public links to your Gemini app conversations, sharing all of the ✍️ prompts and 💬 responses within that conversation with a single URL. Public links allow anyone with the link to ✅ access, 📖 read, 🔁 reshare and continue the conversation with Gemini independently, which can help enhance collaboration and enable colleagues to leverage successful prompts between each other. The feature is off by default and can be enabled by 🧑💻 admins at the domain, organisational unit or group level via the new conversation sharing setting in admin panel.
In the second week of March, Google expanded support for Gemini in the Chrome browser, rolling it out to 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇮🇳 India and 🇳🇿 New Zealand. At the same time, support for over 50 more languages was introduced; if you’re in a supported location, you’ll be able to use Gemini to ❓ ask questions, 📝 draft emails, have 🗣️ two-way conversations and more, from within Chrome, in 🇨🇳 Chinese, 🇫🇷 French, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇱 Polish, 🇸🇪 Swedish and more.
At the end of the month, the Lyria 3 Pro model, Gemini’s most advanced music generation model, was added to the Gemini app, allowing you to create custom 🎶 AI music tracks up to three minutes long. The new model also offers enhanced creative control by letting you ✍️ specify song sections like intros, verses and choruses in your prompt.
NotebookLM
Several new features rolled out to 📓 NotebookLM last month to enhance its content creation and AI capabilities. You can now ✏️ edit individual slides on your 🖼️ slide deck, generate 🎥 Cinematic Video Overviews, choose between ten new 🖊️ infographic styles, 💾 save, 🔁 shuffle and rerun 🧠 Flashcards and Quizzes, 📂 export slides as PPTX (Powerpoint) files and upload EPUB files as sources. Additionally, your 💬 conversations will now be automatically saved within NotebookLM with the added ability to convert past conversations into artefacts such as 🔊 Audio Overview or 📹 Video Overviews.
Google Vids
At the same time that Lyria 3 Pro was added to the Gemini app, Lyria 3 and Lyria 3 Pro also became available in 📹 Google Vids. This means that you’ll now be able to use ✍️ text prompts to create custom 🎶 soundtracks that are either 30 seconds long or up to 3 minutes long, depending on the model employed, and use them directly in your 🎬 video projects.
Google Admin Panel
In addition to seeing who joined a Google Meet call, at the start of of the month 🧑💻 admins gained the ability to see exactly how participants accessed the call. The specific ✅ “permission type” is now logged within the audit event; this includes which 👥 participants admitted others and what user account was used to grant a meeting room access to an 🔐 encrypted meeting.
Catch up on February’s updates
Do you want to see what happened in February? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our February 2026 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.