Everyone has meetings, but nobody wants them. So for those times when you’re in a meeting but mostly just surfing the web, it’s nice to have a transcript to make sure you didn’t miss that one important nugget of information that actually pertains to your job. Google knows this, so it’s adding automatic meeting transcriptions to Meet.
You previously needed Otter to record and transcribe your calls. It’s now built-in. The new functionality is available for English meetings, with French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese support coming in 2023.
Microsoft Teams added a similar option for English meetings over a year ago. Given Google’s experience with other speech-to-text services like its Assistant or the Android Recorder app, it’s a bit odd that it took this long to add this to Meet, but better late than never.
Google adds meeting transcripts to Calendar invites for up to 200 attendees. When a recurring meeting happens, the latest transcripts are automatically added. The company recommended that participants in meetings with over 200 invitees seek a transcription manually.
Transcriptions can be switched off at the group, domain, or organization level. Google has tied transcription to host administration, so participants can’t access transcripts.
Given its usefulness, we can’t imagine why auto-transcription to Docs wasn’t rolled out widely to begin with. It’s no longer limited to Workspace for Education users, although low-tier Workspace, Business, and Enterprise subscribers can’t access it. Personal Google accounts can’t use Docs transcription. Google said the deployment begins on October 24 and might take up to 15 days.
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