Google Meet 2026: every new feature, and how to use it

Open meet.google.com and Meet no longer waits for a code. It shows your meetings by day and by week, straight from Google Calendar: the ones coming up with a Join button, and the ones that are over with everything they left behind.

Everyone invited sees the same meeting on their own home page, so nobody has to dig for the link. A meeting that is over carries its files as chips: Gemini’s notes, the recording, the transcript, the slides attached to it, and a video overview if someone made one.

The video overview on a meeting is not automatic: someone makes it, in Google Vids, from the notes. Docs to video reads a Google Doc, a Word file or a PDF, writes the script, picks the pictures and reads it out in a voice you choose. You press Create.

Two more steps put it on the meeting: share it, or people get a request for access instead of the video, and attach it to the event in Google Calendar, which is what puts it on everyone’s Meet home page.

For a meeting across the table, or for talking your own ideas out: press one button, put the laptop or phone near whoever is speaking, and Gemini writes the summary, the next steps and a transcript with a time on every line, in a Google Doc in your Drive.

The button is on the Meet home page, at the top right, beside New. On a phone it is on the Meet app’s home screen.

When someone shares their screen, Gemini now takes a screenshot of what is shown and puts it into the notes, under the time it was on screen. A client shows you the error, a teammate walks through the numbers: afterwards it is all in the notes, picture included.

It is on by default, in the panel that opens from the pencil icon at the top of the call, under More settings.

Instead of pressing Start taking notes every time, tell Meet once: Gemini then starts the notes by itself in every meeting you host, or only in the ones with three or more guests.

If Gemini has lately started taking notes on its own and you did not know why, this is it: on Business Standard and Business Plus, Google turned on notes for meetings with three or more guests by default from 29 September. On a personal account with Google AI Pro or Ultra, the same setting turns notes on for all your calls.

Most of us close the tab the second a call ends. Do not: the screen after it now has Routines for this meeting. One press drafts the follow-up email in Gmail from Gemini’s notes; another adds your next steps to Google Tasks.

The screen only comes after an event in Google Calendar with at least one guest from outside your organisation. A quick meeting started from New, or a call with only your own team, ends without it. The routines run on Gemini’s notes, so the notes have to be on during the call, and when the draft is ready, Google Chat tells you, with a button that opens it.

Join a call in a language you do not understand and hear it in the one you do. Meet translates what people say out loud, as they say it, in 63 languages, and it works out which language is spoken on its own. A client can speak English when they can and switch to French when they get stuck, and you still understand them.

Nobody is translated without saying yes: until someone allows it, the badge on their video says Not translating. The 63 languages, any language to any other in the same call, arrived on 22 October; until then it was English paired with a handful of others. Work domains on Rapid Release have them now, everyone else from 2 November, over about two weeks: the last part is how to be first.

Not new, but worth it: Meet installs from Chrome as an app. It opens in its own window, with no address bar and no tabs to lose it in, sits in your dock or taskbar, and has every feature Meet has in the browser.

Google rolls a feature out over weeks: first to work domains on Rapid Release, then, at least a week later, to everyone on the Scheduled release, and some features take more than 15 days to reach every account. If your plan has a feature in the table and you cannot see it, that is usually why.

A Workspace admin can move the domain to Rapid Release and switch everything on, at admin.google.com. Here is all of it, in order. Each change can take up to 24 hours.