On Wednesday Google unveiled several updates to its Workspace productivity app aimed at simplifying the workflow of remote teams. Among the features announced at the company’s I / O event are auto-generated text summaries of chat conversations to help keep team members on the same page.
Introduced in February in Docs, Google’s word processing tool, summaries are used to create overviews of text in documents. The company expanded the summary today to include workspace “spaces” — chat rooms that enable conversations and file sharing for specific purposes
Summary in Spaces selects and highlights the most important information from the chat, allowing users to quickly jump to the right place in the chat history.
“You’ll be able to see a useful summary of the most important information, decisions and actions from one platform without having to read all the missed messages,” Drew Rowny, product manager for Gmail and Google Chat, said before the announcement. . “You can click to jump to the part of the conversation that matters most to you so that you can easily dig into the details, stay on top of everything, and get up quickly.”
This feature is expected to be launched in the coming months for English-speaking clients using Business, Enterprise, Education, Essentials, and Frontline publications.
Google also plans to bring automated transcriptions to Meet calls to allow team members to catch up on meetings they missed out on. That feature is due out later this year, Google said. The summary feature in Docs and Spaces will also be applied to transcription text, though this won’t arrive until 2023.
New security features are also on the way. Existing phishing systems and existing malware will be added to Gmail to protect other Workspace applications, including Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
It will generally be done later this year.
