Google Workspace Changes

Gems, custom AI experts, are now available directly in the side panel of Google Slides, allowing users to leverage customized AI assistance without switching applications.

Gems, which are custom AI experts designed to help complete specific goals, tasks, and workflows, are now integrated directly into the side panel of Google Slides. This integration allows users to utilize both custom and pre-made Gems, such as a writing editor or sales pitch ideator, within the Google Slides application. The feature aims to enhance efficiency by minimizing repetitive prompting and enabling tailored AI assistance for various tasks like creating content, generating sales interactions, or reviewing documents, all without needing to navigate away from the current application.

Gems, custom AI experts, are now available directly in the side panel of Google Sheets, allowing users to leverage customized AI assistance without switching applications.

Gems, which are custom AI experts designed to help complete specific goals, tasks, and workflows, are now integrated directly into the side panel of Google Sheets. This integration allows users to utilize both custom and pre-made Gems, such as a writing editor or sales pitch ideator, within the Google Sheets application. The feature aims to enhance efficiency by minimizing repetitive prompting and enabling tailored AI assistance for various tasks like creating content, generating sales interactions, or reviewing documents, all without needing to navigate away from the current application.

Gems, custom AI experts, are now available directly in the side panel of Google Drive, allowing users to leverage customized AI assistance without switching applications.

Gems, which are custom AI experts designed to help complete specific goals, tasks, and workflows, are now integrated directly into the side panel of Google Drive. This integration allows users to utilize both custom and pre-made Gems, such as a writing editor or sales pitch ideator, within the Google Drive application. The feature aims to enhance efficiency by minimizing repetitive prompting and enabling tailored AI assistance for various tasks like creating content, generating sales interactions, or reviewing documents, all without needing to navigate away from the current application.

Gems, custom AI experts, are now available directly in the side panel of Google Docs, allowing users to leverage customized AI assistance without switching applications.

Gems, which are custom AI experts designed to help complete specific goals, tasks, and workflows, are now integrated directly into the side panel of Google Docs. This integration allows users to utilize both custom and pre-made Gems, such as a writing editor or sales pitch ideator, within the Google Docs application. The feature aims to enhance efficiency by minimizing repetitive prompting and enabling tailored AI assistance for various tasks like creating content, generating sales interactions, or reviewing documents, all without needing to navigate away from the current application.

Improved Google Meet hardware admin log events now offer more granular details and a new event category for better tracking and troubleshooting.

Google Meet is enhancing its hardware administration log events within the Google Workspace Admin console. The deprecated 'HANGOUTS DEVICE SETTING' event category is being replaced by a new, more precise 'GOOGLE MEET HARDWARE' event type. This update provides administrators with a more comprehensive audit trail, including granular device-specific information like device ID, resource IDs, and device type, for actions such as changing lifecycle state, OU membership, device properties, performing bulk actions, and running commands on Meet devices. This increased visibility aims to improve an organization's security posture and facilitate more effective troubleshooting of Google Meet hardware issues.

New 'Locked' feature for Google Groups to prevent unauthorized changes.

Google Groups now offers a 'Locked' feature, enabling administrators to restrict modifications to group attributes such as name, email address, and memberships. This is particularly beneficial for organizations synchronizing groups from external identity systems like Entra ID, ensuring consistency and preventing discrepancies. The 'Locked' status helps maintain data integrity by limiting who can make critical changes within Google Workspace, while not affecting access or content moderation settings. Super Admins, Group Admins, and custom roles with specific privileges can manage this feature.

Studio lighting in Google Meet, powered by Gemini, is now accessible on all devices.

Google Meet's studio lighting feature, which uses machine learning and Gemini to simulate studio-quality lighting by adjusting light position and brightness in video feeds, is now available across all devices. The rollout to Rapid and Scheduled Release domains is complete. It is available for Google Workspace Business Standard and Plus, and Enterprise Standard and Plus.

Automated meeting recordings, transcripts, and "Take notes for me" in Google Meet now support seven additional languages.

Google Meet's automated meeting recording, transcript generation, and "Take notes for me" features, previously only in English, now support French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Meeting artifacts will automatically be generated in the meeting host’s supported language. This feature is rolling out now to Rapid and Scheduled Release domains, with availability varying by Google Workspace edition.

Google Drive log events in the security investigation tool now include search-related information.

Drive log events in the security investigation tool have been expanded to include search events. This new information encompasses resources returned from a search, the user's query, and more, allowing admins to assess normal vs. anomalous search behavior that might indicate data exfiltration. This data can also be queried via API. The rollout to Rapid and Scheduled Release domains is complete, and it is available across various Google Workspace editions.

Google Drive now supports opening Microsoft Office files with embedded PDFs.

Users can now seamlessly open Microsoft Office files containing embedded PDFs directly within Google Drive, ensuring a smoother experience when working with these document types. This feature is available to all Google Workspace customers, Google Workspace Individual subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts.

Imagen 4 is now available for image generation in Google Docs, Slides, and Vids, supporting multiple languages.

Users can now leverage Imagen 4, Google's highest quality image generation model, within Google Docs, Slides, and Vids. This update provides outstanding text rendering, improved prompt adherence, higher overall image quality, and multilingual prompt support in over 20 languages. It's available to Google Workspace Business and Enterprise users with access to Gemini in Docs and Slides, and users with access to Gemini in Vids.

Imagen 4 for image generation in Google Docs, Slides, and Vids with multilingual support.

Users can now leverage Imagen 4, Google's highest quality image generation model, within Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Vids. This update provides outstanding text rendering, improved prompt adherence, higher overall image quality across all styles, and supports multilingual prompts in over 20 languages, enhancing creative capabilities across these applications.

New AI function in Google Sheets allows users to generate text, summarize, and categorize data directly within cells.

Google Sheets now integrates a new AI function, powered by Gemini, enabling users to perform various data manipulation tasks directly within spreadsheet cells. This includes generating tailored text using spreadsheet information, summarizing data by highlighting key parts, and categorizing data into meaningful groups to detect patterns. This feature aims to help users create hundreds of rows of data quickly, such as categorizing user feedback or writing personalized emails, without needing extensive data or spreadsheet expertise.

Support for file and people smart chips is now available with the Google Sheets API.

The functionality of the Google Sheets API has been extended to include the ability to write and read file and people smart chips. This enhancement allows developers to programmatically interact with these rich data types within Google Sheets, further integrating and automating workflows.

Improvements have been made to the file upload experience on Google Drive for Android and iOS devices.

Google Drive's mobile upload experience has been enhanced with more granular controls and proactive status updates. Users will notice improvements to the initial upload screen for adjusting file name and location, a progress bar showing upload status and time, and a dedicated Upload Tab for viewing pending or recently completed uploads on both Android and iOS devices.