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September 2025: Google Meet and Google Workspace Update Recap

There were numerous updates implemented across Google Meet and Google Workspace during September 2025. They include 🎉 interop between Google Meet Hardware and Microsoft Teams, changes to 🔔 notifications from 💬 Chat, ✉️ Gmail and 📊 Sheets, the introduction of ✨ Ask Gemini ✨ to Google Meet, the ability to leverage Gemini to ✏️ refine text directly within Chat and Slides and much more.

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

Google Meet

An image of Google Meet Hardware featuring a video bar mounted above a large screen displaying a video call of a woman and two men on Microsoft Teams, with a Google Meet touch tablet in the foreground. There are annotated arrows pointing at the Microsoft Teams meeting and the Google Meet device.

It is now possible to join Microsoft Teams calls from Google Meet Hardware and Google Meet calls from Microsoft Teams Rooms. A third-party platform, Pexip, is the bridge enabling this long-awaited and oft-requested interoperability. Pexip Connect is a paid product (contact us to purchase) and works on any qualified and supported Google Meet Hardware, regardless of whether your room kit has got a Compute System or Android video bar, letting you dial into a Teams meeting from Desk 27, Logitech Rally Bar, ASUS room kit or any other solution.

💡 Note: Zoom and Webex interop is already natively supported from any Google Meet Hardware.

Google also announced an upcoming change to the admin permission relating to managing Google Meet Hardware and calendars. Starting 15th October 2025, this privilege will no longer automatically grant admins full 📖 read and ✍️ write access to all of the 📅 Google Calendars in an organisation by default. Whilst 🧑‍💻 admins will still be able to assign calendars to hardware devices, full access to all Google Calendars will need to be enabled separately for them should you choose to grant it. The new settings were made available in September, ahead of taking effect in October.

A screenshot of the Google Meet web interface. Four portrait images of four female meeting participants are shown on screen. In the upper-right corner, the user has hovered their mouse over the Gemini button which has triggered a pop-up entitled “Ask Gemini”. The pop-up explains that Gemini can answer the user’s questions during the call and asserts that it won’t create a record of the meeting.

At the end of the month, ✨ Ask Gemini ✨ started becoming available in Google Meet. It allows you to leverage Gemini during meetings to 📝 summarise the conversation, 🔎 identify discussed action items and their assignees, 🏃 catch you up on what you missed and respond to other ✍️ direct prompts. Gemini does this by referencing 💬 captions, the 📄 Gemini notes document (if enabled), 📂 files you can access and other public information.

💡 Note: Ask Gemini will be rolled out first to Google Workspace Business Plus. More tiers of Workspace will be given access in early 2026.

eCDN (Enterprise Content Delivery Network) reduces the bandwidth usage on your network when multiple people are watching the same Google Meet livestream – leveraging a peer-to-peer network to cut bandwidth usage by as much as 95%. Now, a change to how IP address allowlists and blocklists are interpreted will lead to a more predictable implementation when there are overlapping IP address ranges.

Google Workspace

Google Chat

Previously, only 💬 chat replies triggered notifications in Google Chat. But, as of the first week of September, if enabled, 😀 emoji reactions to your messages will also send a 🔔 push notification. This means that you'll be alerted when someone reacts to your message with an emoji, letting you know to which message someone reacted and when. This allows you to acknowledge the response when it happens so that you’re not left 🤔 wondering or ⌛ wasting time checking the conversation.

Accessing Chat apps within all Google Chat 💬 spaces, group chats and direct messages has been simplified. You now only need to install an app one time; after that, Chat will automatically install it to every other conversation when you try to use it. This eliminates the need to manually install it each time you use it in a new conversation, enabling you to get started using the apps quicker.

💡 Note: admins can pre-install Chat apps for all users in their organisation.

A short video of the Google chat interface. The user is within a group conversation and is composing a message to send to the chat. The user clicks the “Refine” button located in the toolbar within the message box and a refined version of the user’s message is generated and shown in a pop-up window. The user clicks “Replace” and the initial message is replaced with Gemini’s new version.

Towards the end of the month, you were able to start ✍️ refining your messages directly within 💬 Google Chat conversations using ✨ Gemini. Similar to the experiences in Gmail and Google Docs, the “Refine” button lets you ask Gemini to propose an alternate version of what you wrote that aims to improve clarity, spelling and more, without you needing to 🔁 switch tabs.

💡 Note: using Gemini to refine messages currently only supports messages in English and is accessible on 🌐 web only.

Google also introduced an Owner role in Google Chat to help make managing 🚀 Chat spaces easier. The current Manager role will be renamed Owner with all of the same 🔐 permissions it now has and all current Managers will become Owners in their space. The new Manager role will come in with similar permissions to Owner, with the exception of being able to 🗑️ delete spaces or ⬆️ upgrade participants to an Owner role. This helps to ensure that all of the 🧑‍💻 admin tasks are overseen by the right people.

There were a few features added at the end of the month, specifically for developers, to enhance 💬 Chat apps. First was a 🖼️ carousel widget that organises information into one compact card which you can then 🖱️ scroll through horizontally. The addition of Markdown support means that you can save 🕑 time by no longer needing to convert the text to HTML before using it in your application. And, lastly, ✏️ richer text formatting lets you add various list types and code blocks to cards to help improve the 📑 structure and 📖 readability of information.

Gmail

A short video of an Android phone screen showing the user’s notifications. The email notification displays sender details, the first three lines of the email and options to Archive, Reply or Mark as read. The user clicks “Mark as read”; the notification then transitions to the text “Marked as read” with the option to “Undo”, “Manage” and “Clear all” below. The user proceeds to open the Gmail app where the email that was marked as read from notifications is unbolded and confirmed as read in the app.

The Gmail 📱🔔 mobile notifications were updated to make them a bit more helpful for Android and iOS users. On Android, you will be able to ✅ mark emails as read directly from notifications and, on iOS, you’ll see the 🧑 sender’s avatar in notifications, helping you to quickly identify important emails.

Additionally, there were three updates to the 📑 Gmail audit logs. The first update gave 🧑‍💻 admins the ability to access the Gmail log events via the audit and investigation tool. Secondly, the logs became available in the Google Workspace Admin SDK Reports API, which can let you automate access to data for 📊 analysis. Thirdly, to improve transparency, a new log event is being added for the times when ✨ Gemini accesses content in ✉️ Gmail messages, giving admins a clear report on exactly when and how Gemini uses Gmail data.

Google Calendar

A short video of the Google Calendar interface with a pop-up window for a Google Meet “Weekly update” event open. The user clicks “Duplicate” from the menu. Information of the duplicated event such as date, time and guests are then displayed. The user then adds Google Meet video conferencing to the duplicated event and clicks to expand the meeting details. Under the meeting ID heading there is a meeting code pre-filled in the text bar with the text “Enter an existing meeting code” in small text below it.

Last month, Google began rolling out ways to make joining 🖥️ Google Meet calls from 📅 calendar apps easier. When inviting guests to a Google Meet call using Google Calendar, the 🔗 Meet link will now be automatically added to the 📍 location field, benefitting people that use Outlook and other calendar services. Additionally, Google Calendar will 🕵️ detect Google Meet links in events sent from alternative calendar apps where the joining details have been put into fields other than the ones Google Calendar previously expected.

In order to enhance 🛡️ privacy and 🔐 security, 📅 Google Calendar was updated mid-month so that 📹 Google Meet call details are no longer copied over to duplicated 🗓️ calendar events. However, you’re still able to manually replicate the Google Meet joining details if they’re needed. This helps to ensure that meeting codes are only copied if it’s intentional, aligning Calendar’s behaviour with expectation and reducing the risk of accidentally sharing meeting details and 📂 artefacts such as meeting 📜 transcripts.

Google Drive

At the start of the month, Google rolled out several updates to improve the user experience for ✏️ editing 📄 scanned documents in Google Drive on 📱 Android. There are now larger page previews which allow you to see documents in full, a 🎨 redesigned user interface that makes it easier to delete or retake scans of pages and a Material 3 page thumbnail carousel that lets you quickly reorder pages.

A screenshot of the Google Drive home page interface. There is a heading that says “Ask Gemini” with four buttons: “Learn about Gemini in Drive”, “Summarize a folder in Drive”, “Learn about a file in Drive” and “Catch me up”. Below these are the users’ suggested folders and below those is a list of their suggested files. The listed files include columns for the name, details and location of the files. Under the details column, for a few of the files, is a short summary of that file’s contents.

Automated ✨ Gemini-generated file summaries were made available on selected 📄 Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and PDFs in your suggested 📂 file list. They’re visible on the Google Drive 🏠 home page and provide a quick overview of the files’ contents without you needing to open the file. To get a more in-depth analysis of the file, you can 🖱️ click the “See more” button or use the Gemini side panel to provide you with additional information.

Additionally, Gemini in Google Drive was expanded to support 📱 Android and iOS devices. This means that, similar to the 🌐 web experience, you’ll be able to leverage Gemini within Drive to ask questions related to your 📄 files and 📂 folders whilst on the go. For instance, you could ask Gemini to 📝 summarise long documents and folders, quickly locate specific details or 💬 discuss topics that include information from multiple files.

🔐 Ransomware detection and 📂 file restoration were introduced into beta at the end of the month. If ransomware is 🕵️ detected, file syncing from Google Drive for desktop will be paused to ✋ halt the spread of that ransomware. To limit data loss if ransomware did infect your files, file restoration within 🗃️ Drive will allow you to easily recover previous versions of the files from before the files got infected.

Google Sheets

The version history in Google Sheets was condensed last month to make it easier to identify what’s been changed in a Sheets file. This means that you no longer need to scroll thousands of rows in large sheets to 🔎 find where the changes occurred as, by default, you’ll be shown only the rows that have been ✏️ edited. This makes it easier and quicker to spot what's been modified and by whom, especially when you’re working with large data sets.

💡 Note: the previous version history experience will still be available in Sheets.

A little later in the month, language support for the AI function in Google Sheets was expanded to include seven additional languages. The function can now support prompts in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish. This enables you to leverage Gemini within any cell by calling “=AI( )” to generate 💬 text and to 📝 summarise or categorise data in the spreadsheet in many more languages.

A short video of the Google Sheets interface. The user has a table of data shown in a spreadsheet with the Gemini side panel open on the right. The user sent a natural language prompt to Gemini that began with “Create a formula that calculates the total budgeted hours for...” and ended with “explain how the formula works”. Gemini generates an output of a formula that the person can use along with an explanation for each part of the formula.

The ✨ Gemini side panel in Google Sheets saw updates to its formula generation feature towards the end of the month. This means that when generating formulae using Gemini, you’ll be able to now benefit from detailed, 👣 step-by-step explanations of how the proposed formulae work as well as choose from 🔢 multiple formula options. Additionally, if an error occurs, Gemini can explain why and how to correct it.

Lastly, to help you stay on top of changes in your spreadsheets, Google doubled the limit for 🔔 conditional notifications, increasing it from 10 to 20. This broadens the criteria for outlining which specific ✏️ changes you’d like to receive as ✉️ email notifications when they happen. You can set up personalised rules to notify you when cell values change or meet specific conditions, such as when a project task is ✅ completed or a sales report hits a 📈 threshold.

Google Slides

A short video of a “Marketing presentation” Google Slides file. The user is editing the 11th slide which contains a heading and a text box on the left and a line graph on the right. The user clicks on the text box, clicks the text refining icon and selects the option to make the text “More formal”. A preview of the edited text is shown. The user clicks “Refine” again and selects “Shorten”. A preview of the formalised and shortened text is shown. The user then clicks “Replace” to update the slides content.

Google Slides gained the ability for you to ✏️ refine text using ✨ Gemini directly within the app. Similar to 📄 Google Docs, you can select text, 🖱️ click “Refine” and then either type in your ✍️ own prompt to edit the text or choose one of the pre-set options to quickly shorten, rephrase, bulletise or formalise the selected text.

Google also updated the image editing experience in 🖼️ Google Slides and 📹 Google Vids at the end of month. The experience now uses the latest model – Nano Banana – and, in addition to replacing the background, you can now write custom Gemini prompts to make edits to images.

Google Vids

A short video of the Google Vids interface with the Gemini “Help me create” interface window over the top. The user types in a prompt to summarise a Slides presentation, which includes the tagged Slides file. The user is shown an editable outline of the proposed video. The user clicks “Next”, selects a design template and a preview of the template design slides are shown. The user clicks “Create the draft video” and a generated video complete with multiple scenes using content from the Slides file is shown.

In September, ✨ Gemini's "Help me create" feature in Google Vids was enhanced to support 📹 video creation by directly referencing Google Slides presentations. This update lets you quickly 🔄 turn your slides into videos. By including a 📂 Slide file in the ✍️ prompt, Gemini will automatically draw from the content of Slides, including 🖼️ images and 💬 text, to generate a draft video. This draft can then be imported and further ✏️ edited. Later in the month, Google expanded this further, enabling the generated videos to also include 📜 Gemini-generated scripts, 🗣️ AI voiceovers and 🎵 background music.

Gemini

A short video of the Gemini app interface. The user is on the “Gem manager” page which has four pre-made Gems shown at the top and the list of the user’s custom Gems below. The user clicks on the sharing icon on one of their custom Gems. A small window pops up showing a list of people with current access to the Gem and a prompt bar to “Add people, groups and calendar events” with which to share the Gem. The user clicks “Done” and the window closes.

Google made it possible to share 💎 Gems with others in Google Workspace, just like you share 📄 Google Docs, 🖼️ Slides and other 📂 files in Google Drive. Gems are ✨ AI assistants whose instructions can be tailored to your needs. By sharing them, you’ll be able to 💬 leverage successful prompts already developed by team members to complete tasks more efficiently and also customise, improve and distribute Gems for individual departments or groups.

💡 Note: Gems can only be shared and stored in Google Drive if any linked content is also shareable.

Also announced last month was that ✨ Gemini will soon be coming to Google Chrome on Mac and Windows. This will bring Gemini’s capabilities directly into your 🌐 browser, letting you ask page-related questions, 🔑 extract key information and 🗣️ converse with Gemini Live. 🧑‍💻 Admins were able to start preparing for the general release of Gemini in Chrome last month by configuring user access from the Google admin panel.

💡 Note: at launch, Gemini in Chrome will be available only in the 🇺🇸 US and in English.

NotebookLM

A short video of the NotebookLM interface showing a user's chat with the AI assistant about surrealism. The studio side panel is open on the right, displaying options for audio and video overviews, mind maps, reports, flashcards and quizzes. The user selects “Flashcards”; flashcards begin generating and then, when ready, the user clicks on it to view the first one. After seeing the first question, the user reveals the answer and then clicks "Explain" to get an explanation from the AI assistant in the chat.

To improve your learning experience in 📓 NotebookLM, Google introduced the ability to create personalised 🗂️ flashcards, 🧠 quizzes and 📑 reports (in over 130 languages) based exclusively on your uploaded 📄 documents and other materials in your notebook.

Additionally, an alternative learning approach was also added to NotebookLM, allowing you to learn more interactively with the ✨ AI assistant. The new 📚 Learning Guide encourages more participation by using open-ended questions to guide you 👣 step-by-step to the answer. Learning this way, rather than just receiving the answer straight away, can help you to gain a deeper understanding of topics.

Google Forms

A short video of the Google Forms interface. The user has a form titled “Business Networking Event Strategy” opened. From the menu at the top, the user clicks to switch from viewing Questions to viewing the 148 Responses. When the user clicks on the “Responses” tab, a Gemini summary card of the first question, which asks “What was your primary goal for attending this event?”, starts to generate and a bulleted output of the response summary is displayed below the question heading.

To help you save 🕑 time when 📑 reviewing answers in 📋 Google Forms, ✨ Gemini-generated summaries of responses are now proactively shown for every 📝 short-answer and paragraph question in 📋 Google Forms. This means that you no longer need to manually invoke Gemini’s assistance for analysing responses each time; instead, you can quickly get an overview of the sentiment and feedback from the form’s questions automatically before diving into individual answers.

Google Admin Panel

Lastly, Google simplified their 🔔 alerts and 📤 response tools in the Google Admin panel by combining the reporting rules and the activity rules into one, under the name Activity Rules. 🧑‍💻 Admins will have the ability to set a limit to the frequency of alerts whilst also receiving more detailed 💬 alert messages. Some features differ depending on the organisation’s tier of Google Workspace.

Catch up on August's updates

Do you want to see what happened in August? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our August 2025 recap.

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