There were many updates that rolled out across Google Meet and various Google Workspace apps throughout November 2025. You can now generate 📃🔊 PDF audio overviews in Drive, access the 😃 full emoji library during Google Meet calls and use 🧵 inline threading within direct and group conversations in 💬 Google Chat. There were also two new AI models introduced: ✨ Gemini 3 Pro, Google’s latest AI model, and 🍌 Nano Banana Pro, Google's latest 🖼️ image generation and ✏️ editing model available in Slides, Vids, NotebookLM and the Gemini app.
Continue reading to uncover what’s new; or, jump directly to the application that interests you most.
Google Meet
At the start of the month, Google Meet’s 💬 in-meeting chat was updated to now be synced to and powered by Google Chat. Within a call, all participants will benefit from a richer chat experience (including 👍🔥 emoji reactions to messages) and, outside of the call, internal participants will be able to access the meeting chat from the Google Chat UI, enabling them to send meeting materials like 📂 files and 🔗 links ahead of time or review messages after the call has ended.
💡 Note: messages in Google Meet will only be powered by Google Chat for meetings scheduled in Google Calendar. External attendees will only have access to conversations during the meeting.
A little later into November, Google made the full emoji library available in Google Meet. Previously limited to nine emoji, you can now pick from the full breadth of the emoji library and access a much wider array of 🤩🤯💥🤸 emoji reactions. This allows for more diverse ways to share feedback and engage with others during a Google Meet call.
💡 At launch, access to new emoji will be available on 🌐 web and 📱 Android with iOS to follow. On Google Meet Hardware and livestreams, you will be able to see the new emoji reactions when they’re used by other participants but not send them.
A new “Longer” option for ✨✍️ Gemini’s “Take notes for me” in 📹 Google Meet was added last month. The new option will let you generate 📝 notes twice as long as normal, allowing Gemini to capture even more important points mentioned during the meeting, which can be useful for technical or complex discussions where specificity matters.
💡Note: the option to generate longer meeting notes with “Take notes for me” will currently only support English.
To improve the 📹 livestreaming experience when hosting on Google Meet, you’ll now be able to gain more 🔎 insight into viewers’ perceived quality through an extended set of quality metrics in the Google Meet 📑 audit event logs. This includes being able to 🕵️ identify potential network configuration adjustments needed to improve media when delivery either from Google Servers or when using eCDN.
Google Workspace
Google Chat
Last month, Google redesigned the 💬 Google Chat conversation header on the 🌐 web, consolidating buttons revealing 📁 Shared items, ✅ Tasks, 🧵 Threads, and 📍 Boards in one portion of the screen. These features now open as an expandable side panel by default, allowing you to access them without leaving the main conversation.
💡 Note: Tasks are only available in spaces, not groups or direct messages.
Google also brought the ability to reply with an inline thread to direct and group messages in 💬 Google Chat. Previously only available in 🚀 Chat Spaces, inline threading allows you to reply to a specific message and continue 🗣️ discussing the topic in a separate thread within the main conversation. This keeps the main conversation view 🧹 tidy and prevents it from becoming cluttered.
You’ll also now be able to 👀 preview the most recent unread message in a 💬 Google Chat conversation or 🧵 thread by 🖱️ hovering over it in the left-hand menu. This allows you to view the latest message without having to ✅ mark the conversation as read.
Google Drive
In 🗃️ Google Drive, from the sharing dialog in shared drives, you’re now able to set 📅 expiration dates when sharing 📃 individual files and apply an expiration date specifically to the viewer role for 📂 shared folders. Also, the My Drive experience will now be consistent with shared drives, so that access reverts to its previous level after the temporary higher access level expires.
💡 Note: access expiration can currently only be set on 🌐 web or 📱 Android.
Similar to the audio overview feature in NotebookLM, you can now generate audio overviews of 📃 PDF files directly in Google Drive. Audio overviews will transform long PDFs into AI-hosted podcast-style 🔊📝 audio summaries using ✨ Gemini. The overviews will be automatically saved to Drive which you can then access and listen to on 📱 mobile or 🖥️ desktop devices.
💡 Note: at launch, audio overviews will need to be generated on desktop and will only support PDFs in English.
Google introduced two new Google Drive features into beta during November. Firstly, in closed beta, was a new Gemini-based model for 📑 classifying files in Google Drive, allowing 🧑💻 admins to provide instructions via ✍️ prompts to automatically apply data classification 🏷️ labels to Drive files. This offers an accurate and scalable alternative to manual model training.
Then, later in the month, the ability to migrate 📃 files and 📂 folders from Dropbox to Google Drive using the new Data Migration Service was was made available in open beta. The service also supports delta migrations, letting you keep Drive in sync in case there are additional changes to the contents in Dropbox.
To make it easier to spot which Google Drive files have data classification labels, the highest-ranked badge or label name is now visible next to the file title in the 🏠 Home, 🗃️ My Drive, 👥 Shared Drives and 🔎 Drive search results views. This update eliminates the need to navigate through menus or open the file to view the label. If more than one label is attached to a file, there will be a label count next to the badge where you’ll be able to view the full list of labels.
Uploaded 📹 videos in 📂 Google Drive can now automatically generate 💬 captions in 27 more languages, including 🇳🇱 Dutch, 🇫🇷 French, 🇮🇩 Indonesian and 🇯🇵 Japanese. The expanded language support makes videos more accessible to a wider range of people with no additional work required to manually ✍️ transcribe the video. The captions also allow you to 🔎 search for video content more easily.
Google Calendar
To provide 🧑💻 admins with more control, 📅 secondary Google Calendars now have dedicated owners instead of having the calendar being managed at the organisational level. Creators of new secondary calendars will automatically become the owner; for existing calendars, an owner will be assigned based on current permissions. You’ll also be able to 🔁 transfer secondary calendar ownership to another user in the same organisation.
The ability to dedicate 🕑 time slots on 📅 Google Calendar to work on a specific task with new features for Google Tasks began rolling out in mid-November. The update allows you to block off time on your calendar for a specific ✅ Google Task and utilise Google Calendar features, like "Do not disturb" (which 🔕 mutes 💬 Google Chat notifications), to maximise your 🧠 focus and productivity on a task. Tasks created in Google Calendar will be added to your tasks list and you’ll get 🔔 reminders about the task until you mark it as complete, ensuring that the task doesn't get forgotten. As opposed to the general-purpose 🎧 “Focus time” in Google Calendar, using Tasks lets you set deadlines and mark the objective as completed afterwards.
💡 Note: only 💼 work or 📚 school accounts can use the "Do not disturb" and "Automatically decline meetings" options for Tasks created in Google Calendar.
When ✏️ editing the 🕑 start time or 🗓️ recurrence of a Google Meet event in 📅 Google Calendar, a new and unique 🔗 Google Meet link will now be created for all future events in the new series. This prevents the accidental re-use of meeting codes when there are significant changes to the nature of the event. The rest of the event ⚙️ settings and 📝 details will remain the same.
Gemini
✨📚 Gemini's Deep Research capability now integrates with Google Workspace apps, securely accessing your own information from 📂 Google Drive files, ✉️ Gmail and 💬 Google Chat messages. This expands its research scope beyond just 🌐 web content, allowing Gemini to generate comprehensive, tailored research 📑 reports on various topics without requiring you to manually upload individual files.
💡 Note: this integration is available first on 🖥️ desktop and will be rolling out soon on 📱 mobile.
Google introduced Gemini 3 Pro, its latest AI model, towards the end of November. The new model features multimodal understanding including improvements in reasoning across 💬 text, 🖼️ images, 🔊 audio and 📹 video. There are also new features such as the enhanced reasoning mode, 🧠 Gemini 3 Deep Think, the new agentic development platform, 🌠 Google Antigravity, and the 🎨 Generative UI capability, which enables Gemini to create dynamic customised user experiences such as 🌐 web pages and applications.
Additionally, Google began rolling out its latest Gemini image generation and editing model, 🍌 Nano Banana Pro, in Google Slides, Google Vids, the Gemini app and NotebookLM. The new model will enable you to 🖼️ create infographics and images, 🛝 "Beautify this slide" in Google Slides, make shareable 📄 PDF versions of slide decks in NotebookLM and more.
Google Vids
Also added in November was the ability to reference up to three images simultaneously when generating 🎬 video clips using the latest Veo 3.1 model in 📹 Google Vids. By selecting your preferred 🖼️ images and ✍️ writing a prompt, Vids will incorporate the 👭 subjects, 🐻 characters and 📦 objects from the uploaded images to ensure a cohesive story across multiple generated clips.
Google Forms
“Help me create” in 📋 Google Forms expanded support for an additional seven languages. This means that you’ll now be able to leverage Gemini to generate a draft form using a ✍️ prompt, which can include references to existing 📂 files, in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.
Google Voice
The ability to 🔴 record calls and use 📞 desk phones was added onto the Google Voice Starter tier. Both features were previously only available to Google Voice Standard and Premier.
Google Admin Panel
To enhance 🔐 security of communication within an organisation, more Google Workspace 🧑💻 admins gained the ability to control which of their users are able to create new conversations in 💬 Google Chat. Previously only available to education users, this new ⚙️ setting will enable admins to restrict users (by Organisational Unit or by Groups) from initiating unmanaged direct or group conversations and from managing members of existing chats.
💡 Note: if the restriction is applied, users will still be able to send and receive messages in conversations where they are members.
Catch up on October’s updates
Do you want to see what happened in October? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace from the month in our October 2025 recap.
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