Google Meet’s AI note-taking feature begins rolling out today

Google Meet’s new AI-powered feature, “Take Notes for Me,” began 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, except instead of automatically transcribing what everyone says, it summarizes what everyone talked about. Google first announced the feature at its Cloud Next 2023 conference.

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

Running late for a meeting? Google says its new feature will also provide you with a summary of what you missed, so when you’re able to join the meeting, you can quickly catch up, and no one will 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 provided in the same Google Doc with the meeting notes.

This feature also seems like a good accessibility tool for anyone (like me) who struggles to process spoken language and take notes at the same time. It could allow them to be more focused and fully present during meetings instead of 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 have to go back through the automatically generated transcript to make sure it captured the conversation correctly. In my experience, this often involves re-listening to specific parts of the recording and manually correcting the transcription. I’m skeptical, but I hope Google Meet will be a better note-taker than a transcriber.