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November 2024: Google Meet and Google Workspace Update Recap

November 2024 saw a range of updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace, including new Google Meet Hardware, customisable sections in Google Chat, AI-generated cover images in Google Docs, the launch of Google Vids and more.

Read on to discover everything that has launched, started rolling out and is coming soon; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most:

Google Meet

A short video of a user in the Google Meet green room for a meeting called “Team meeting”. At the start of the video, the user leans back and away from their camera, making them appear off-centre in their video frame. Meet detects this and automatically centres the user within their frame. As the camera framing takes place, the virtual background that the user has applied remains still.

In November, automatic 📹🖼 camera framing became available to everyone in Google Meet calls, including all tiers of Google Workspace and personal Google accounts. Bringing this feature to more people ensures that everyone is clearly visible and equally represented during a call, creating a more inclusive experience. In addition, when using a 🌄 virtual background in a meeting, you will now remain centred within your video tile and your background will stay fixed, preventing distractions.

Google also shared that in-meeting 💬 chat messages will now be visible to Google Meet livestream viewers, meaning you won’t miss out on important context when watching the stream. This change makes it easier for hosts to share important updates and links to resources with the knowledge that everyone participating in, and watching, the meeting can see those messages.

Ecosystem Updates

An image of the complete ASUS Large Room, featuring the ASUS Google Meet Compute System surrounded by the included peripherals: the MIMO Myst touch controller, AVer camera and AVer speakermic.

In Google Meet Hardware news, ASUS has announced its next generation of Google Meet Hardware kits, for which it has partnered with MIMO and AVer. Expected to be available in early 2025, the new lineup consists of three familiar configurations: Starter Kit, Small Room and Large Room. Each bundle features the latest ASUS Google Meet Compute System, either a remote control or MIMO touch panel and both an AVer speakermic and AVer camera.

To better represent meeting room availability and make reserving a space easier, Logitech announced two new features for their Logitech Room Booking platform that integrate with the Logitech Tap Scheduler, Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini: Auto-book and Auto-release. Using the additional viewfinder camera on the Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini, Auto-book automatically reserves a room when people enter it, whilst Auto-release frees up a space if nobody shows up or if a meeting ends early and people leave the room; and if the room is empty for consecutive instances of a recurring meeting, Logitech Room Booking will remove the room from future occurrences of that meeting.

Google Workspace

Google Chat

At the start of November, the ✨ Gemini ✨ side panel* started rolling out in 💬 Google Chat. This enables you to talk with Gemini about your conversations and get help with summarising messages, identifying action items and finding specific details – all without leaving the space, group message or direct message you’re in.

A short video of a user in Google Chat on the web. The video begins with the user hovering over a conversation under the “Direct messages” section in the left-hand navigation menu. As the user hovers over the conversation, they click on the three-dot menu and select “Move conversation”. A sub-menu appears, offering the user the option to move the conversation to their “Important” section or a new section. The user clicks “Move to new section”, and a new section is created in the left-hand navigation panel. The user names the new section “Platform leads” and the conversation is automatically moved into the section.

Another particularly noteworthy feature for Google Chat this month was the introduction of custom sections. This feature allows you to group conversations into personalised sections in the left-hand navigation menu, making it easier to find and manage chats in a way that suits you. Custom sections can contain both direct messages and 🚀 spaces. They are particularly useful for grouping conversations by similar topics, projects or levels of importance into one, easily-accessible place.

Changes were also made to the way thread notifications are handled in Google Chat. Specifically, all new activity from 🧵 threads that you don’t follow will no longer be highlighted in bold or appear at the top of your conversation list. This helps reduce distractions and makes it easier for you to prioritise your most important conversations.

A short video showing a user looking at the Home view in Google Chat. From the Home view, they can see a list of all of their recent conversations – some of which have unread messages in bold, and others which have been fully read by the user. The user clicks on one of the bolded messages, from a conversation called Project Clover, and a side panel opens up on the same page from which they can respond to the ongoing conversation.

A new split-pane view launched in Google Chat, allowing you to quickly reply to messages whilst staying on the 🏡 Home view. This saves time and requires less navigation back and forth between the Home view and individual conversations.

Additionally, Google Chat now lets you add up to 20 🖼 photos and 📹 videos to a single message sent from the web. You can use the file picker or drag and drop your multimedia files into the compose window. This matches the 📱 mobile experience where you can already attach 20 photos and videos at once.

Google also shared that the Google Drive Chat app will soon be automatically installed and offer more features, including the ability to handle access requests directly from the Chat interface. This is in addition to already being able to ✍ respond to and ✅ resolve comments in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files from Chat.

In an update to the Google Admin panel, admins can now apply select Google Chat ⚙ settings – such as file sharing, whether users can install Chat apps, message history and more – at group level for more granular control. These settings can already be configured at the Organisational Unit (OU) level.

A short video of a user starting a huddle in Google Chat on the web. The user has a direct message open and clicks the phone icon in the conversation header. Upon clicking this, three options appear: “Call Madison”, “Send a Meet link” and “Start a huddle”. The user selects “Start a huddle” which opens a small window in the bottom-right corner of the screen. The window includes various Google Meet call controls, such as mute and unmute, video on and off, screensharing, end call and more. The person to whom the user is talking joins and the huddle starts as audio-only.

At the end of the month, 🎧 huddles were introduced in Google Chat, allowing you to start an instant, audio-first meeting from within your conversations. Powered by Google Meet, huddles are available in all conversation types and can be particularly useful for quickly syncing with colleagues about projects you are currently discussing in Chat without needing to open a meeting in another tab.

Gmail

A screenshot of a user’s Gmail inbox. On the left are the user’s folders and emails. On the right, the Gemini side panel is open. In the side panel, the user has asked Gemini to “Create a 30 min calendar event for my weekly yoga class every Monday and Wednesday at 9am.” Gemini has responded to the prompt to acknowledge the request and share the resulting calendar event. At the bottom of the side panel, the user can enter additional prompts.

Using the Gemini side panel* in ✉ Gmail, you can now ask Gemini questions about your schedule and create new events in 📆 Google Calendar without needing to leave Gmail. For instance, you can find out about your itinerary for next week or ask Gemini to create a recurring meeting in your calendar.

Data classification 🏷 labels are now available in open beta in Gmail. Already available in Google Drive, classification labels in Gmail enable you to categorise emails based on criteria such as 🛡 sensitivity, ✅ status, 📄 document type and much more. They can be used to organise messages and apply policies, including Data Loss Prevention rules, to protect sensitive content.

Google also announced that, when composing an 📨 email in the Gmail 📱 Android app, you can now drag and drop email addresses between the “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” fields, saving time and effort when organising recipients. Previously, if you wanted to move a recipient to another field, you would have to manually retype their email address or copy and paste it in.

Google Calendar

In mid-November, Google announced that the 📆 Google Calendar Android app is getting a full-screen experience dedicated to viewing ✅ Google Tasks. Already available on the web, this view makes it easier to see and manage all of your tasks and task lists on a single screen without the distraction of your scheduled calendar events.

Google Docs

A short video of a user working on a document titled “Cymbal on-the-go” in Google Docs. The user navigates to the “Insert” menu, clicks on “Cover image” from the dropdown and then selects “Help me create an image”. Upon clicking this, a panel opens up on the right-hand side of the screen which allows the user to enter a prompt to create an AI-generated image with Gemini. In the text box, the user enters the prompt: “A top-down view of a white desk with neatly arranged sticky notes, a pen, pencil, notebook, and potted plant”. They then select “Photography” from the style dropdown and click the “Create” button. After several seconds, Gemini generates four images. The user selects the first image and it is automatically applied to the top of their document, spanning its entire width.

A new Gemini feature* started rolling out in 📝 Google Docs, allowing you to use Gemini to generate unique, visually-appealing inline and full-bleed cover images tailored to your documents based on prompts. This feature helps bring your vision to life and saves you time searching for the perfect image. It works similarly to Gemini’s “Help me visualize” feature in Google Slides which launched last year.

Google Docs also released a new collection of 🧩 building blocks in November. Designed to help you get started with projects quicker, you can now insert templates for task tracking, contact lists and decision logs conveniently via the "@" menu, at the top of a newly-created document or from the new Docs sidebar. In addition, existing table building blocks have been improved with neatly-formatted title rows and data types for columns, i.e. 📆 date, 🍟 dropdown chips, 📂 files or 👥 people.

In security news, you can now import your sensitive Microsoft Word files into Google Docs with 🔐 client-side encryption (CSE). This update, which is available in open beta, means you can safely migrate and collaborate on files across platforms without compromising data security. You can already import sensitive Microsoft Excel files into Google Sheets with CSE.

Google Sheets

The Google Sheets tables feature, which enables you to quickly transform an unorganised data range into a structured and formatted table automatically, received two improvements during the month. The first improvement makes it easier to work with table references, including getting formula suggestions to utilise table references and formula corrections. The second improvement brings a more intuitive and efficient 🔦 filter experience to the tables feature by only showing you the relevant filter options for a column based on its data type rather than all 21 filter options.

Another Google Sheets update enables you to search for and reuse pre-defined queries from BigQuery in Connected Sheets to avoid copying and pasting.

The maximum number of rows of results returned from Looker for pivot tables in Connected Sheets has increased to 100,000, allowing you to analyse more data.

Google Slides

A short video of a user creating a presentation in Google Slides. The user clicks on the “Templates” button in the Slides toolbar which opens a collection of pre-built templates on the right-hand side of the screen. They scroll through the options and select the “Investor Pitch” template. The user then browses the various slide designs within the template and clicks the “Insert All Slides” button, applying the template to all of their slides. They begin customising the template by adding text to the slide.

A new collection of modern, professionally-designed templates has been added to Google Slides to help you build presentations faster. These templates are pre-built for a range of use cases, including 💼 sales pitches, 🧑‍🏫 lesson plans and 🤝 team-building exercises, and are accessible via the new “Templates” button in the Slides toolbar.

Google Drive

To enhance the file-scanning experience on the Google Drive 📱 Android app, you can now apply a ⚫⚪ black and white filter to scanned documents. This new option improves the clarity of text and other key details, making scanned content easier to read.

The Google Drive file picker, which is used whenever you move files and folders or add shortcuts to items, has also been updated in the Drive Android app. This brings it in line with the web experience that launched in 2023 and makes it easier to find recently-viewed files and distinguish between storage locations, such as “My Drive” and shared drives.

For 🧑‍💻 developers, the Google Picker API is introducing a new method that allows them to pre-navigate the picker to specific file types, making it faster and easier for users to grant access to the files that the applications need. This will be available in January 2025.

Google Vids

A screenshot of the new Google Workspace app: Google Vids. The screenshot shows a rectangular box with text reading “Hello, Xavier. Let’s make a video”. Below this, there is a prompt box with text reading “Describe your video. Type @ to reference your Workspace files”. In the background, there is a new untitled video open.

At the beginning of the month, Google announced that its new, collaborative, AI-powered video-creation tool – 📽 Google Vids – is now available. This new Google Workspace application simplifies video creation by allowing teams to produce engaging videos without any special software or skills required. It serves as a video, writing, production and editing assistant and offers a range of features – including some powered by Gemini* – to help you get your message across in a compelling and visually-appealing way.

Gemini

When creating a custom 💎 Gem in the Gemini app, you can now upload 📂 files* – including Google Docs, Google Sheets and PDFs – to tailor your Gem to your specific needs and get more contextually-relevant responses.

💡 Gems are configurable sets of instructions that you can use to govern how Gemini responds to you. They prevent the need for repeating the same instructions each time you interact with Gemini to complete similar tasks, meaning you can set the context for the Gem’s responses so that it acts as a writing assistant, interview coach, translator and more.

Google also announced that organisations with Gemini for Google Workspace add-ons will soon have access to six new premade Gems* tailored to 💼 business use cases, including a sales pitch ideator, hiring consultant, copywriter and more. You will also be able to use your Workspace account to log into the Gemini mobile app on 📱 Android.

The Gemini side panel* is now available in seven additional languages, meaning you can now get help with tasks such as summarising, analysing and generating content across Google Workspace in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish. This feature was previously available in alpha.

Google has made the Gemini app available to teen students in 🎓 education* with added data protection. This tailored Gemini experience can be turned on by Google Workspace for Education admins; chats are not reviewed by human reviewers or used to improve AI models.

A short video of a user accessing the Gemini mobile app on Android. The video begins with the user clicking on the Gemini icon from their home screen to open the Gemini mobile app. Once the user has opened the app, they click on the camera icon and take a photo of some handwritten notes using the camera on their mobile phone. After tapping “Attach”, the photo is inserted into their prompt and the user types the following: “I just had a meeting with my customer, can you clean up my notes”. The user enters their prompt and Gemini responds with a cleaned-up version of their handwritten notes.

In late November, the Gemini 📱 mobile app, which offers the standalone Gemini experience on the go, started rolling out to teams accessing Gemini as a core service within their Google Workspace plan. This means you can chat with Gemini from your mobile phone and ask for assistance with research and finding quick answers. You can also use your phone’s camera to capture images and have Gemini perform tasks based on those images, such as cleaning up handwritten notes.

Catch up on October’s updates

Take a look back at our October 2024 Google Meet and Workspace recap to discover updates like 💦 watermarking in Meet, 📹 video messages in Chat, 📑 document tabs in Docs,🍟 third-party smart chips in Sheets and more.

Stay up to date on the latest Google Workspace platform features and developments by following us on LinkedIn and subscribing to the monthly 🦎 Gecko newsletter.

*These features require select Gemini for Google Workspace add-ons. Compare the Gemini add-ons here.

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