Starting today, some Google Workspace customers can have Google Meet be their personal note-taker.
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Google Meet’s newest AI-powered feature, “take notes for me,” has started rolling out today to Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Education Premium, or AI Meetings & Messaging add-ons. It’s similar to Meet’s transcription tool, only instead of automatically transcribing what everyone says, it summarizes what everyone talked about. Google first announced this feature at its 2023 Cloud Next conference.
Unfortunately, it only supports spoken English right now, but it seems like it could make missing an important meeting less stressful; it automatically takes notes in a Google Doc and will attach that file to the calendar event after the meeting is over, so you can reference them later on. It will also send that Google Doc to the meeting organizer and anyone else who turned the feature on.
Running late to a meeting? Google says its new feature will also give you a summary of what you missed, so when you are able to join, you can quickly catch up — and no one should have to worry about repeating themselves. If you use Google Meet’s recordings and transcripts tool at the same time, links to those files will also be provided in the same Google Doc with the meeting notes.
This feature also sounds like a good accessibility tool for anyone (like me) who has trouble processing spoken language and taking notes at the same time. It might allow them to be more focused and fully present during meetings instead of having to ask someone to repeat what they said multiple times.
Google expects to complete the rollout to all Google Workspace customers by September 10th, 2024 — but there’s no guarantee how accurate Google Meet’s new feature will actually be.
AI can make a lot of mistakes; every time I’ve used Meet’s transcription tool, I have to go back through the automatically generated transcript to verify that it correctly captured the conversation. In my experience, that often entails listening to specific parts of the recording again and manually fixing the transcript. I’m skeptical but hopeful Google Meet will be a better note-taker than transcriber.
