Google Meet’s AI meeting notes are finally available in languages other than English

One of the most monotonous tasks that anyone has to do in the corporate world is take meeting notes. It’s tedious, and it can make a 30-minute meeting feel like the 24 Hours of Le Mans of business. With many companies now wholly reliant on applications like Zoom and Google Meet to conduct meetings remotely, a whole new world of potential has opened up for applicable uses of artificial intelligence. Luckily, for people whose companies solely rely on Google for their digital workspace, Meet’s recent integration with Google Gemini has practically eliminated the need for a note taker during meetings, freeing up all of its participants to pay full attention to the discussions at hand. Up until now, this feature was only available for meetings that took place while speaking English.

Today, that all changes, as Google announced on its Workspace Updates feed that “Take notes for me” has been rolled out for seven additional languages. Meetings taking place in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish are now able to be summarized with Gemini. It’s easy to switch between languages after activating Gemini’s note-taking capability; you can click on the language notes that will be taken in when initially pressing “Take notes for me,” or you can change the language from the settings page (Settings > Meeting records > Language spoken in the meeting). Google says that multilingual meetings are not available yet.

The world of Google AI

Google Meet’s feature that turns the mundane into an easy and unthought-of part of business meetings is also available on smartphones, albeit without live summaries. Before October 2024, features such as this Google Gemini-infused tool wouldn’t have been possible with the old, now-defunct Google Meet app that was once called Hangouts Meet. Google delisted it and pushed users to download the newer version with upgraded features and streamlined updates. It has turned into a great arm of the Google Workspace, and if you’re reliant on it for work, knowing how to get the most out of it is essential.

This tool is yet another application of Google Gemini’s far-reaching skill set, and although public discourse might make you think the primary focus of Gemini is to create potentially stolen art, where it’s actually most useful seems to be the workspace (it doesn’t necessarily make us feel any easier about that Super Bowl ad, though). Because of AI’s potential in that realm, it shouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise that Google is heavily investing in startup artificial intelligence companies like Anthropic, which it owns 14% of. Google is also breaking barriers in robotics, giving Gemini and Project Astra a body that can interact with the real world. We’ll take note-taking AI any day of the week, but advanced AI robots might be where we draw the line.