What you need to know
- Google announced its major October Workspace Drop for businesses, stating data comprehension, structure, and formatting is easier in Sheets.
- This update rolls out ransomware detection in Drive for desktop users, who will be notified is something is amiss and have their data sync halted.
- Gmail gets improved security, as Google brings end-to-end encrypted emails to the platform.
Google’s rolling out another major Workspace update that’s entirely by Gemini, so here’s the roundup of everything you can expect.
As always, Workspace is Google’s primary avenue for businesses, but these new AI features it detailed this week are advancing data comprehension and security. Data in Google Sheets can become a bit much, but Gemini’s updates arriving for October aim to improve its format and ensure the app’s analytical capabilities are up to par. Google states Sheets can now understand complex and multi-step instructions from users.
As an example, the post highlights Sheets’ ability to “delete all archived rows, apply conditional formatting, and add a ‘Notes’ column” all in a single prompt. Moreover, Gemini advances with “web grounding.” Users can now ask the AI to conduct some research on the internet.
The AI can input the information you deserve into your spreadsheet automatically, as well as opening its abilities to more languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, and German.
Business security is always an object of discussion, so new AI defenses are rolling in for October. Google says it’s bringing in ransomware protections for Drive users on desktop. This runs in real-time, and if the system is triggered, Google says users will have their file sync halted. There will also be a visible notification on your computer, informing you of what’s happened, so you can take immediate action.
The post adds that users can restore any corrupted files “in bulk” to a version where the ransomware did not exist.
AI protections hit Gmail
Gmail’s also getting in on the AI defenses, as Google rolls out E2EE (end-to-end encrypted) protections. Now, users in Workspace can send “encrypted and confidential” emails to whomever they need to, even if they “use a different email provider or work outside your organization.”
Wrapping up the huge October drop are thread summaries for users in Google Chat, as well as “refine me,” which corrects any grammar mistakes and more before sending. Speech translation in Meet grab an expansion, bringing in English to German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Google highlights its video generation update for Flow and the Gemini app, which brought Veo 3.1 to users. Over the base v3 model, Veo 3.1 is said to give users more creative agency with their generated video clips. Additionally, this updated model enhances its sound capabilities, gives users better narrative control, and even touts better “realism” for generated textures.
The Veo 3.1 model is available in Google Vids, Flow, and the Gemini app.
October’s drop sort of piggybacks off the one from August. During the dog days of summer, Google brought file summaries to Chat, Video Overviews to NotebookLM, and upgraded the Vids app with Veo 3 (and that’s now gone up to v3.1 in just two months).
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