Awaneesh Verma leads Alphabet’s Google Meet, Google Voice and other real-time communications products, overseeing a massive network that reaches nearly 3 billion users and 11 million businesses worldwide.
However, his motivation to eliminate friction in communication and ensure people are “really understanding each other” has roots in a personal journey that dates back to before his time at Uber and Duolingo — to the time he learned how barriers can stop people from communicating.
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Born in the United Kingdom to parents who immigrated from India, Verma spent his childhood in the city of Sheffield, in the interior of the country. He recalled, in a recent interview with Fortune, that, for a long time, he was “the only Indian kid in the class”.
Although his hometown was “a great place,” he couldn’t help but wonder “what the rest of the world was like—feeling and looking.” He recalls how fascinated he was by a physical atlas in the pre-Google Maps days. “I was looking at maps and drawing places based on them.”
Years later, when Verma was studying engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he heard Alan Eustace, Google’s head of engineering, give a talk about ongoing projects — including Google Translate.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is the future of human connection.’” Within a few years, Verma was working on Google Translate — part of a trajectory that took him to Duolingo as its first chief product officer, then to Uber, also as head of product, and then back to Google.
Verma told Fortune that she loves her job because she always liked the idea of something travel-related, saying she wanted to be a travel show host when she was a kid.
“I really liked the idea of meeting people from different cultures and really understanding them,” he said, adding that he was lucky to land a job that allows him to do just that.
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Testing the machine while driving
As head of Google Meet, Verma told Fortune he is always testing his product, which billions of users depend on to do business. (Though more specifically, he says he’s always testing the product internally, from research and proofs of concept to prototypes and beta versions for end users.)
He stated that the beauty of Google Meet is that it is part of Google Workspace — which means that all notes made on it become part of Google Drive.
Verma said she uses Take Notes with Gemini in “practically all” of her meetings. With a single click, this tool instantly creates a living document with meeting notes, which become the team’s “official decision,” transforming discussions into something “durable and consistent.”
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He noted that this reliability made distributed collaboration easier, recalling a time when a third of his team in Stockholm (Sweden) felt comfortable ignoring an inconvenient meeting — something unthinkable just a few years earlier.
The team needed to receive feedback from executives based in the Bay Area (San Francisco, USA), but the timing was not ideal. Still, they felt confident not participating. “We trust that you will represent our point of view well, and we will read the notes and transcript later.”
The head of Google Meet also said that he usually does debriefing (analysis) projects and asks team members what worked well and what could have gone differently.
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After everything is written on the whiteboard, he compares it with what Gemini — the AI note taker — recorded about the meeting. “When in doubt, you can go back and read the transcript,” he said, noting that Gemini includes citations — so when anything is in doubt, “there’s one click to the exact part of the transcript where you can simply read what happened.”
The goal is to use AI to facilitate high-fidelity human conversations — including tone and emotion — allowing teams to reach conclusions faster than with asynchronous communication.
Verma illustrated this by recounting a 60-minute discussion with a fellow engineer that, when summarized by the Ask Gemini feature, immediately resulted in a 15-topic product specification.
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Real-time translation
Verma and her team’s innovations come to life when Fortune speaks to Niklas Blum, a native German based in Google’s Stockholm office. He demonstrates Google’s real-time speech translator — a very different product from Google Translate.
“Can you hear me, Nick? I’m speaking German to you right now,” said Blum, as the journalist could hear his voice in the background sounding German, while, with a few seconds delay, his voice came over the speakers in English — in an almost eerily identical manner.
Blum explained that AI technology has now evolved to the point where it can clone his voice in real time so that it sounds like he is speaking in English.
He added that Verma’s team worked closely with Google’s DeepMind on the technologies, with multiple layers of AI working: translation and generating the translated voice.
The delay, according to him, depends largely on the language, as the AI needs to consider grammar and structure. German, for example, tends to place the verb at the end of the sentence — so there is a delay for the AI to guarantee the correct meaning.
This real-time translation tool was developed over about two years, Blum said, adding that it began as an open-ended exploration. But the more Google talked to global companies operating across language barriers, the more they identified a need in the market.
He said it was “very difficult” to maintain conversations across multilingual teams while ensuring everyone received the correct information. “We want Google Meet to not just be a tool to connect people, but something that creates value in the conversation,” he added.
“The beauty of technology is not just the fact that it can automate and make everything easier,” Verma said, but also that you can trust “that it neutrally represents everything that has been said.”
Behind this there is an obvious objective: to solve the problem of excessive post-pandemic meetings, which defines the daily lives of many workers.
Verma notes that these meetings are often ineffective, leaving participants uncertain about what was decided and what comes next. He said he felt a real need to combat the “meeting fatigue” that arises when meetings are not run efficiently.
Verma says that every improvement involves asking: “How could we have helped people do this better?”
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