AI-powered automatic note-taking in Google Meet is now available

Google Meet’s Latest AI-Powered Feature: “Take Notes for Me” started implementing today Google Workspace customers with Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Education Premium, or AI Meetings & Messaging add-ons. It’s similar to Meet’s transcription tool, except instead of automatically transcribing what everyone is saying, it summarizes what everyone was talking about. Google first announced the feature at its 2023 Cloud Next conference.

Unfortunately, it currently only supports spoken English, but it looks like it could make missing an significant meeting less stressful; it automatically takes notes in a Google Doc and attaches that file to a calendar event after the meeting ends, so you can refer back to them later. It will also send that Google Doc to the meeting organizer and anyone else who has enabled the feature.

Running overdue for a meeting? Google says its fresh feature will also give you a summary of what you missed, so when you’re ready to join, you can quickly catch up — and no one should have to worry about repeating themselves. If you’re using Google Meet’s recording and transcription tool at the same time, links to those files will also be shared in the same Google Doc as your 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 could allow them to be more focused and fully present during meetings, rather than having to ask someone to repeat what they said multiple times.

AI can make a lot of mistakes; every time I’ve used Meet’s transcription tool, I’ve had to review the automatically generated transcript to see if it captured the conversation correctly. In my experience, this often involves re-listening to specific parts of the recording and manually correcting the transcript. I’m skeptical, but I’m hopeful that Google Meet will be a better notetaker than a transcriber.