Google Workspace is changing for the better!

Google Meet

As the world changes, so does your workspace and even more so, Google’s Workspace. Google has announced some major updates that will assist you and your co-workers to stay better connected. There is a large number of additions here, but the standout feature is the ability to use Google Meet video calls inside the well-known Workspace apps. This includes Docs, Sheets, and Slides, with the benefit of boosting the collaborative efforts of your office.

Here are some of the points Google has shared:

Google Meet updates

  • In-meeting reactions: Coming next month, in-meeting reactions will let attendees visually express themselves with emojis 👍 ❤️ Quick and engaging, they help teams celebrate wins and offer support, all while adding an extra layer of personalised engagement. 
  • Meet in Docs, Sheets, and Slides: Born in the cloud and designed for maximum flexibility and collaboration, Docs gives you the ability to comment and work together. Bringing collaborators on Meet directly into your Docs for real-time work sessions builds on the collaborative power of Docs for the hybrid era. 
  • Picture-in-picture: We’re bringing picture-in-picture to Meet running on Chrome browsers to help presenters and multitaskers see their audience while navigating different tabs and windows. Clicking on picture-in-picture quickly takes you back to the full Meet session.
  • Automatic noise cancellation on Google Meet hardware: If sound quality isn’t equal, the quality of a meeting decreases. Whether your background noises come from your remote location or the office, everybody should be able to have limited distractions in meetings. 
  • Companion mode updates: We’re adding the ability to display your self view while using Companion mode, to make it easier for meeting attendees to see the expressions and gestures of those joining from a conference room. This update will work toward making sure those in a physical space have the same experience as those who are working remotely—we’ve released great innovation that’s helped people work remotely, and we want to make sure people have access to these experiences as they head back into the office.
  • Q&A and polls for livestream attendees: With the rise of hybrid and remote work, meeting sessions can be large, and we want to give people access to the tools they need to participate and maintain an interactive experience from anywhere, including livestreams.
  • Streaming meetings directly to YouTube: Later this year we’ll enable meeting hosts to stream meetings directly to YouTube from the Meet activities tab. 
  • Improving security in meetings: In May, we’ll be rolling out updates to bring optional client-side encryption to Google Meet, and later this year will introduce optional end-to-end encryption for all meetings.

Google Chat updates in Spaces

  • Inline threading in Spaces: Inline threading will streamline nuanced conversations while maintaining the larger context of a space enabling deeper, more focused collaboration.
  • Shareable & discoverable Spaces: With an easy flow that feels immediately intuitive—similar to document sharing—we’re making it even easier to build and discover communities within organizations. We’re also improving search within Chat and Spaces to surface the most relevant files and conversations, and bringing filter chips to chat search results later this year. 
  • Increased team size limits: To help bring the power of Spaces to organizations of all sizes, we are increasing team size limits to 8,000, and we’ll increase this to 25,000 by the end of this year to support communities as they grow.
  • User roles & moderation: Strong team cultures are built on trust and psychological safety. That’s why we’re adding features that improve content moderation, the ability to designate managers and guidelines for specific Spaces, and new admin capabilities to delete Spaces.

Google Voice updates

  • SIP Link: Coming later this year, SIP link will allow customers to connect SIP trunks from their chosen telecommunications carrier via certified session border controllers from Audiocodes, Cisco, Oracle, and Ribbon.
  • On-demand call recording: On-demand call recording will begin rolling out to Google Voice Standard and Premier subscribers next month.
  • Automated call recording: Premier subscribers will have the additional benefit of automated call recordings, which is a top request from customers in regulated industries.