Shape the future with Google Summer of Code 2026!

By Stephanie Taylor, Mary Radomile & Lucila Ortiz

Are you a passionate beginner ready to make your mark in open source? Now is your chance to make an impact in the 2026 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program!

For over two decades, GSoC has been a critical launchpad, consistently introducing fresh, enthusiastic talent into the open source ecosystem. The numbers speak for themselves: GSoC has connected more than 22,000 contributors with over 20,000 mentors from 1,000+ open source organizations, all collaborating to keep this vital community thriving.

Google, like everyone else, is built on open source. We depend on a healthy, vibrant open source ecosystem and want to lower the barrier to entry for people who want to contribute to the open community. Join in, learn great skills, and make an impact on people around the world.
Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist, Google Cloud

Over 3+ months, contributors spend their time collaborating on real-world projects right alongside experienced mentors and their communities. This isn't just about coding; this deep immersion in open source does more than build valuable technical skills. It cultivates a strong understanding of community dynamics, best practices, and the soft skills needed to become a truly impactful open source contributor.

Check out the trailer below to learn more about the massive impact GSoC has made over the last two-plus decades.

Google Summer of Code trailer

Join GSoC as a Mentoring Organization

Application Period: January 19 – February 3

If you're interested in your organization participating, now is the time to start! We welcome around 30 new organizations to GSoC annually—and yours could be one of them.

  • Visit our website where you'll find supportive materials to get started.
  • The Mentor Guide is a must-read, offering an introduction to GSoC, community engagement tips, project idea suggestions, and guidance on applying.
  • Pro Tip: For 2026, we'll have an expanded focus on the AI, Security, and Machine Learning domains.

Want to be a GSoC Contributor?

Application Period: March 16 – March 31

Ready to get started? The official website is your first stop!

Spread the Word!

Please help us amplify the message about GSoC 2026! Share this post with your peers, family members, colleagues, universities, and anyone interested in making a real difference in the open source community.

Join us and help shape the future of open source!

Shape the future with Google Summer of Code 2026!

By Stephanie Taylor, Mary Radomile & Lucila Ortiz

Are you a passionate beginner ready to make your mark in open source? Now is your chance to make an impact in the 2026 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program!

For over two decades, GSoC has been a critical launchpad, consistently introducing fresh, enthusiastic talent into the open source ecosystem. The numbers speak for themselves: GSoC has connected more than 22,000 contributors with over 20,000 mentors from 1,000+ open source organizations, all collaborating to keep this vital community thriving.

Google, like everyone else, is built on open source. We depend on a healthy, vibrant open source ecosystem and want to lower the barrier to entry for people who want to contribute to the open community. Join in, learn great skills, and make an impact on people around the world.
Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist, Google Cloud

Over 3+ months, contributors spend their time collaborating on real-world projects right alongside experienced mentors and their communities. This isn't just about coding; this deep immersion in open source does more than build valuable technical skills. It cultivates a strong understanding of community dynamics, best practices, and the soft skills needed to become a truly impactful open source contributor.

Check out the trailer below to learn more about the massive impact GSoC has made over the last two-plus decades.

Google Summer of Code trailer

Join GSoC as a Mentoring Organization

Application Period: January 19 – February 3

If you're interested in your organization participating, now is the time to start! We welcome around 30 new organizations to GSoC annually—and yours could be one of them.

  • Visit our website where you'll find supportive materials to get started.
  • The Mentor Guide is a must-read, offering an introduction to GSoC, community engagement tips, project idea suggestions, and guidance on applying.
  • Pro Tip: For 2026, we'll have an expanded focus on the AI, Security, and Machine Learning domains.

Want to be a GSoC Contributor?

Application Period: March 16 – March 31

Ready to get started? The official website is your first stop!

Spread the Word!

Please help us amplify the message about GSoC 2026! Share this post with your peers, family members, colleagues, universities, and anyone interested in making a real difference in the open source community.

Join us and help shape the future of open source!

Now available: Create AI agents to automate work with Google Workspace Studio

What’s happening

Today we’re introducing Google Workspace Studio: the place to create, manage, and share AI agents to automate work in Workspace—no coding required. 


What you can do with Workspace Studio

Workspace agents built in Studio offer flexibility and intelligence beyond traditional automation.

  • Automate with agents: Move beyond simple, rule-based automation. Agents can reason through problems and adapt to new information, tackling complex workflows such as intelligent prioritization, support issue triage, smart approvals, content generation, and sentiment analysis.
  • Create agents with AI: Empower every user to build custom agents in minutes. End users can simply describe what they want to automate in plain language (e.g., "every Friday, ping me to update my tracker"), and Gemini will create it.
  • Work smarter with context: Agents can now help with tasks such as “Draft a weekly update for Project Cymbal”, or “What should I do today?”. They are deeply integrated with your Workspace apps (like Gmail, Drive, and Sheets). This allows agents to automatically pull relevant context from your documents, emails, and the web, enabling them to provide smarter, personalized answers and take actions based on your specific situation.
  • Integrate seamlessly: Automate across your entire toolset. Agents can be connected to third-party apps and platforms including Asana, Jira, Mailchimp, and Salesforce.
  • Extend capabilities: Create more powerful and personalized agents for your business or education institution:
    • Call external APIs with webhooks to connect to virtually any internal or external service (e.g., push notifications to Slack/Teams/Discord).
    • Build custom steps using Apps Script to integrate with proprietary internal tools, ADK agents, or models via Vertex AI.
  • Share and scale: Agents can be shared with a team for others to copy, similar to sharing a Google Doc. This makes it easy to scale powerful agents across your organization.
  • Use templates: Users can create agents with a library of zero-configuration templates for common use cases that can be shared across your organization. For example:
    • Get a daily summary of unread emails
    • Label emails with action items
    • Get pre-meeting briefs in chat

Additional details

Workspace customers on all eligible editions will get promotional access to higher usage limits of Workspace Studio, allowing users to further experiment with these features. Please note that usage may be subject to change to ensure a consistent and high-quality experience for all users. Additional details on per-user usage limits will be provided in a future update in January 2026.

Users under the age of 18 will not be able to create agents with Gemini AI or use AI-powered steps in agents.

Getting started

  • Admins: Google Workspace Studio is a core service and will be on or off by default based on your organization’s release preference for new products. It can be enabled or disabled at the OU and group level. Additionally, in the coming weeks, Workspace Studio will be rolling out several new features, including enhancements for external sharing, email sending beyond your primary domain, and robust webhook support. These features will be tightly integrated with your existing trusted domains and allow list configurations, ensuring that admins will have the ability to control, monitor, and audit data flow to meet their organization's specific security and compliance standards. Granular admin controls will also be available to manage these features. More info on default settings for sharing, webhooks, and Gemini features can be found in the Admin Help center.
  • End users: Once available, end users can access this feature by visiting https://studio.workspace.google.com/.

Rollout pace

  • Rapid Release domains: Admins will see settings appear in the Admin console at the same time their end users get access to Workspace Studio; this rollout will be gradual starting December 3, 2025.
  • Scheduled Release domains: Admin console settings will roll out gradually starting December 3, 2025; end user access to Workspace Studio will roll out gradually starting January 5, 2026.

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:

  • Business Starter,  Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus
Also available to:

  • Google AI Pro for Education
  • Google AI Ultra for Business

Resources

Android expands pilot for in-call scam protection for financial apps

Posted by Aden Haussmann, Associate Product Manager and Sumeet Sharma, Play Partnerships Trust & Safety Lead

Android uses the best of Google AI and our advanced security expertise to tackle mobile scams from every angle. Over the last few years, we’ve launched industry-leading features to detect scams and protect users across phone calls, text messages and messaging app chat notifications.

These efforts are making a real difference in the lives of Android users. According to a recent YouGov survey1 commissioned by Google, Android users were 58% more likely than iOS users to report they had not received any scam texts in the prior week2.

But our work doesn’t stop there. Scammers are continuously evolving, using more sophisticated social engineering tactics to trick users into sharing their phone screen while on the phone to visit malicious websites, reveal sensitive information, send funds or download harmful apps. One popular scam involves criminals impersonating banks or other trusted institutions on the phone to try to manipulate victims into sharing their screen in order to reveal banking information or make a financial transfer.

To help combat these types of financial scams, we launched a pilot earlier this year in the UK focused on in-call protections for financial apps.

How the in-call scam protection works on Android

When you launch a participating financial app while screen sharing and on a phone call with a number that is not saved in your contacts, your Android device3 will automatically warn you about the potential dangers and give you the option to end the call and to stop screen sharing with just one tap. The warning includes a 30-second pause period before you’re able to continue, which helps break the ‘spell’ of the scammer's social engineering, disrupting the false sense of urgency and panic commonly used to manipulate you into a scam.

Bringing in-call scam protections to more users on Android

The UK pilot of Android’s in-call scam protections has already helped thousands of users end calls that could have cost them a significant amount of money. Following this success, and alongside recently launched pilots with financial apps in Brazil and India, we’ve now expanded this protection to most major UK banks.

We’ve also started to pilot this protection with more app types, including peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps. Today, we’re taking the next step in our expansion by rolling out a pilot of this protection in the United States4 with a number of popular fintechs like Cash App and banks, including JPMorganChase.

We are committed to collaborating across the ecosystem to help keep people safe from scams. We look forward to learning from these pilots and bringing these critical safeguards to even more users in the future.

Notes

  1. Google/YouGov survey, July-August, n=5,100 (1,700 each in the US, Brazil and India), with adults who use their smartphones daily and who have been exposed to a scam or fraud attempt on their smartphone. Survey data have been weighted to smartphone population adults in each country.  ↩

  2. Among users who use the default texting app on their smartphone.  ↩

  3. Compatible with Android 11+ devices ↩

  4. US users of the US versions of the apps; rollout begins Dec. 2025 ↩

20 Gig: How our 25G PON investment shatters the limits of today’s internet

Small but mighty: The new, more efficient GFiber 20 Gig ONT hardware—now three times smaller than the last iteration—enabling up to full 20 Gig symmetrical speeds for our customers. Image from a new installation performed November 10, 2025.


When we launched our 20 Gig early access program, we set an audacious goal to break the 10 Gig barrier that limits existing broadband architectures. Today, we’re announcing a significant milestone in that journey: our latest 20 Gig installation of our new hardware, and a giant leap forward in delivering the network that leaves the status quo behind.


Bringing 20 Gig to life

This is about more than just rolling out our new GFiber 20 Gig ONT device. It highlights the tangible results of our strategic, long-term investment in 25G PON technology. As of now, due to this approach, ~90% of the homes and businesses in our network footprint are already 20 Gig capable. The deployment of this new, next-generation ONT is the key to unlocking that capacity for the home and enabling us to serve customers more broadly than ever before. It also means upgrading the experience for those already on the journey with us; we have several 20 Gig early access customers today, and we will be automatically upgrading them to this new hardware. As we ramp up operations for this new ONT, we expect to move 20 Gig out of our early access program and into a generally available product next year. That’s a really big deal!


Results of a real-world speed test performed on November 16, 2025, by a GFiber 20 Gig customer using the new GFiber 20 Gig ONT. Achieving symmetrical speeds of 19.9 Gbps download and 19.6 Gbps upload, the result—typical sample from multiple tests—validates GFiber’s strategic investment in a 25 Gig network foundation needed for future-proofing both residential power users and advanced commercial applications.

Beyond the 10 Gig Limit: A single, future-proof foundation for every user

This investment delivers truly future-proof speed and capacity, densifying our network without laying down new lines and driving down latency to support the coming tidal wave of multimodal AI growth, immersive video experiences, cloud computing, and more. This capability surpasses traditional XGS solutions (current 10 Gig PON technology) and any DOCSIS (cable internet) network.

What it means for customers

This level of performance is a dream come true for residential power users like Nathan, the newest GFiber 20 Gig customer (Nathan works for GFiber's parent company, Google), whose recent speed test is pictured above. But critically, this foundational leap also turbocharges our commercial product offering. Whether it’s supporting complex institutional research—like that led by Dean Kevin Truman at UMKC—or the next wave of enterprise innovation, our network is ready for whatever businesses and developers build next.

Check out the video below to hear more from GFiber 20 Gig customers about what the leap to 20 Gig means in the real world right now and what it could mean for the internet for years to come.



Posted by Liz Hsu, Senior Director, Product & Billing