Gemini for Google Workspace significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to create presentations, documents, and spreadsheets and makes email a breeze to manage and write. All of this tends to get a little more attention than probably the biggest feature - what you can do with Google Drive using Gemini.
Now that most paid Google Workspace users have Gemini, they can use it to easily find files, summarize collections of files, and now you can even get transcripts for videos uploaded to Google Drive - all just by using a few prompts.
Using Gemini to search for files
Until Gemini, our go to was the search bar or sorting by “Recent” to find tiles. While the search bar may still reign supreme, Gemini is useful for operations such as retrieving a fact that you want if you don’t remember the name of the file, finding all files that reference a particular search term, and other more refined searches.
Basically, instead of scanning and searching entire documents, you can use Gemini to create summaries and find key facts quickly.
Using Gemini to summarize files
While you can do this in Google Docs, doing it in Drive allows you just get a quick readout in Drive itself without having to open another app. All you have to do is select the documents or folder that you want summarized and you’ll get a quick readout with key points. This is especially useful if you work in an area such as law or healthcare where you routinely have to scan long documents.
It works with most file types, including PDFs and, more recently, with videos which we’ll get to in a bit.
Generating images in Google Drive
If you want to give your design team an idea of what you’re looking for, you can create an image in the folder with all of your other creative files simply by asking Drive to generate an image. Again, this is something you can do from within other Workspace apps, but this way you don’t even have to open one of those up.
Working with video transcripts in Google Drive
Probably the most useful feature to date, you can now search through video transcripts in Google Drive. They will look similar to what you see on YouTube videos. The catch is that they only work if you have closed captions turned on for your video, which you can do by right-clicking on the video and selecting Manage Caption Tracks -> Generate Automatic Captions.
This will let you use pull quotes from videos, find relevant segments from a video to use in presentations, and much more. If you need to work with your video to create clips, most paid Workspace users also have access to Google Vids, which will let you create clips from fuller length videos.
Join Google Workspace Labs for Advanced Access
While joining Google Workspace Labs doesn’t guarantee earlier access to new Gemini and Workspace features, it is free to sign up and has been cited as helping with access to specific features in the past. It’s opt-in only, so you have to turn it on. Here’s where you can sign up for it.
Want to do more with Google Workspace? Contact us to make sure you’re upgraded to the level you need to be at to take full advantage of Gemini.
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