October Workspace Drop: New AI-powered storytelling, research, and data protections

Welcome to the October edition of Workspace Drops. This month, we’re delivering enhancements across Workspace and Gemini, including:

• New AI-powered storytelling tools: To boost your creativity, our most powerful Gemini video model is now in Slides and Vids; you can also create a full presentation from a prompt in the Gemini app.
• Deeper research and analysis: We’re helping users get more out of their data in Sheets, with Gemini features that help analyze, structure, and format data.
• Safeguarding your business: New intelligent security features bring AI-powered ransomware protection to Drive and client-side encryption to Gmail.
• More AI assistance right where you're working: Gemini is showing up in more places and apps you use everyday, including in the Drive mobile app, with speech translation in Meet, and with new summarization and writing tools in Google Chat.

More powerful storytelling across Vids, Slides, and the Gemini app

Google Vids now helps 2.5 million monthly active users tell better stories through videos. Powered by Gemini, it makes video creation approachable for everyone by helping plan, edit, and polish your videos; it can even generate original video clips to help tell your story.

Our new Veo 3.1 model is now available in Vids and the Gemini app, giving you higher quality videos with richer audio, more narrative control, and enhanced realism. We’ve also rolled out the ability to transform Slides into engaging videos in Vids, complete with scripts, voiceovers, and music.

You can also now generate a presentation in the Gemini app by giving Gemini a topic or uploading a source in Canvas, and it will create slides, complete with a theme and relevant images. Then export to Google Slides to continue to refine and collaborate with others.

Deeper research and analysis with enhanced Gemini features in Sheets

We’re helping users get more out of their data in Sheets, with Gemini features that help analyze, structure, and format data. Gemini in Sheets now handles complex, multi-step tasks from a single prompt — no need to enter instructions one-by-one. You can ask Gemini to perform multiple edits at once, like "delete all archived rows, apply conditional formatting, and add a 'Notes' column."

The AI function in Sheets now supports web grounding so Gemini can search the web and help you research, for example, by finding recent news articles about a list of competitors in your spreadsheet. To make these AI functions accessible to more teams, we’re also announcing language expansion for the AI function in Sheets, bringing this powerful capability to customers using Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, or German.

Safeguard your data with intelligent security features

Protecting your organization’s data is paramount. That's why we're rolling out new, AI-powered security features for Drive. To combat ransomware attacks, users with Drive for desktop installed on their Windows and macOS devices will now have the benefit of built-in AI defenses for ransomware detection, which can identify suspicious file activity in near real-time and stop syncing users’ files to the cloud. When an attack does occur, users will be able to use bulk file restoration in Drive to roll back corrupted files to their last known safe version, minimizing disruption and data loss.

In Gmail, we're expanding security and compliance by enabling users to send end-to-end encrypted emails to any inbox, including recipients who use a different email provider or work outside your organization. This helps to ensure that your most sensitive communications remain encrypted and confidential, no matter who you're sending them to.

We’re also helping businesses become more resilient in the face of risk with the new Business Continuity plan, a secure and affordable solution that runs Google Workspace in parallel with Microsoft 365. Designed for Microsoft customers seeking to ensure continuity of operations during service interruptions, this plan enables customers to maintain productivity during outages using secure and compliant apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and the Gemini app, without the need for migration. Join our webinar on November 13th to learn more.

Get AI assistance right where you’re working

Gemini is becoming a more helpful assistant by showing up in more places and in more of the apps you use every day.

• Speech translation expansion in Meet: We're expanding speech translation in Google Meet to business users, with support for translating English to and from German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. This helps to break down barriers by automatically translating your speech in near real-time while maintaining your tone of voice and expression. Sign up here for early access.
• Help me refine messages in Chat: Just like in Gmail and Docs, you can now use Gemini in Google Chat to help you strike the right tone, fix grammar, or make your messages more concise.
• On-demand summaries in Chat: Catch up on long conversations quickly. You can now ask Gemini to provide an in-context summary of the conversation on-demand, so you can get the key takeaways without reading every message.
• Gemini in Drive mobile: Gemini is now available in the Drive mobile app, allowing you to summarize long documents, find quick facts, and get insights from your content while on the go.

Get started today

These updates are rolling out to Google Workspace customers now, so give them a try and see how they help you and your team. As always, you can learn more about unlocking the power of generative AI with Workspace.