Google Updates Workspace With More Capabilities

Google is upgrading Workspace, its rival to Microsoft 365, by embedding more artificial intelligence (AI) and other functionality into the platform.

Workspace includes Google’s Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Google Drive, Slides, Calendar and other tools many workers use globally.

Here are the Workspace updates Google recently announced:

Google Sheets Adds New AI Analyst

Google built an AI analyst to help workers make sense of data in Google Sheets.

The “Help me analyze” AI assistant helps employees get started, points out trends that they might have missed, recommends next steps for deeper insights and creates interactive charts to visualize the data.

“Help me analyze” is coming to Sheets later this year. (PYMNTS reached out to Google to get a more specific release date.)

Also, Google recently rolled out a feature in Sheets enabling users to generate “deeper” insights about trends or patterns between different data points and generate visual “heatmaps,” in addition to charts.

For example, a marketing manager analyzing a retail ad campaign can ask Gemini to produce insights and create a chart about the best three performing marketing channels by conversion rate, according to Google. Gemini can generate the report, along with visuals like distribution plots to analyze channel performance.

Read more: Google Makes AI Features Free to Workspace Subscribers

Deep Research Is Accessible Through the Gemini App

Workspace users can now use Deep Research, powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, through the Gemini app.

Deep Research is a personal research assistant that automates the process of gathering, analyzing and summarizing online information. It can help with research preparation ahead of a client meeting.

It then generates detailed reports, which come with links to sources, and users can ask questions about the findings. These reports can be exported to Google Docs and shared with colleagues.

Use cases for Deep Research include market analysis, product comparisons, academic research and more.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is Google’s most capable AI model to date.

Google Drive to Offer Video Transcripts

Last year, Google Drive got the ability to automatically generate captions for uploaded videos. Now, Google is adding video transcripts to videos in Google Drive. Users can now view and search transcripts, which appear in a side bar next to the video player. It highlights the text as it is being spoken.

This capability makes it easier to find specific moments in videos.

NotebookLM Is Coming to Google Docs

Google’s popular audio overview tool, NotebookLM, is being integrated into Google Docs.

NotebookLM takes any documents and turns it into a 2-person AI-generated podcast. In Docs, NotebookLM can create either full audio versions of documents in Docs or turn them into podcasts.

The capability will be arriving in coming weeks.

Google Docs, Gmail and Google Meet Add More Languages

Docs’ AI-powered “Help me write” feature supports English, French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and German.

Gmail can help write emails in eight languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese Korean, Japanese, Italian, French and German.

Google’s video conferencing platform, Google Meet, is also adding more languages for taking notes. It is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

See also: Google’s New Workplace AI Bot Underscores Big Tech’s Enterprise Focus