Google has a full-fledged suite of Workspace apps, sufficient to cater to almost any business’ essential needs. Google has also been intertwining its Workspace services to help boost your productivity. For instance, you can place Meet calls from within a Google Docs file or the Gmail app. Now, Meet is expanding a helpful tool limited to Workspace for Education users — auto-transcribing Meet calls into a Docs file.

In June this year, Google rolled out auto-transcription for educators and academicians. Transcripts can help students refer to lecture information later without actually taking notes during a class. Teachers could also edit these transcripts and share them with people who didn’t attend the meeting, just like an ordinary file on Google Docs.

At Google Cloud Next 2022, the company announced Meet call transcriptions into a Doc is now rolling out to even more Workspace customers. When joining a Meet session with transcription switched on, all the participants will be given a message telling them their words will be transcribed.

Google-meet-transcription-alert
Source: Google

Google says meeting transcripts will be appended to the Calendar invite for Meet calls with up to 200 invitees. The latest transcripts will be automatically added to the invite whenever a recurring meeting occurs. The company also suggests that participants in meetings with over 200 invitees will have to request a transcription from the hosts and co-hosts manually.

Transcriptions will be available by default and can be turned off at the group, domain, or organization level. Google has also tied transcription to the host management setting, so access to transcripts can be turned off for participants.

Given its usefulness, we can't imagine why auto-transcription to Docs wasn’t rolled out widely to begin with. Although it isn’t limited to Workspace for Education users anymore, it will not be available to people with low-tier Workspace, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions. Personal Google accounts cannot access automatic transcription to Docs either. Google says the rollout begins on October 24, and the feature could take up to 15 days to show up in your Meet sessions.