In March, Google announced a host of AI features for its suite of Workspace apps in an effort to keep pace with Microsoft’s rapid integration of similar tools. At Google I/O, the company has a new brand for the effort — Duet AI — but the features themselves are still not widely available to the general public just yet. The company also introduced a new feature called “Sidekick” that can read, summarize, and answer questions about documents across various Google apps.
Duet AI covers a suite of generative AI tools for productivity apps from Google. As we detailed earlier this year, this includes help with writing in Docs and Gmail, creating images for presentations, automatic meeting summaries for Meet, and more. But at the Google I/O conference, it’s the only real thing News The news is that Help Writing is also coming to Gmail on mobile, where it will be labeled Help Me Write — an upgrade to the Smart Compose feature. To actually access these new tools, you’ll need to Register with Workspace Labs and join the waiting list.
The good news: Previously, this queue was private, and now anyone can join it. The bad: It’s not clear when people will get access. Google just says it’s expanding the services “to more users and countries in the coming weeks” but it gave the edge These are estimates of when features will be available:
- Write in Gmail – now available on your phone as well as the web. Available at Workspace Labs today.
- Gmail contextual replies. It will be released to Workspace Labs by the end of the month.
- Create images from text, right inside Google Slides. It will be released to Workspace Labs next month.
- Organize complex projects in Google Sheets. It will be released to Workspace Labs next month.
- Google Sheets Smart Classification. It will be released to Workspace Labs in the coming months.
- Custom backgrounds in Google Meet. It will be released to Workspace Labs in the coming months.
- The building blocks of artificial intelligence in documents. It rolls out to Workspace Labs by the end of the month.
- Linguistic proofreading of documents. Rolling out in preview for Workspace commercial users in the coming months.
As mentioned earlier, the only strong news is the “Help me type” AI assistant on the Gmail mobile app, which is definitely an interesting prospect. (Microsoft launched something similar in April by integrating Bing into its SwiftKey Keyboard app for iOS and Android.) In a briefing with reporters before the I/O conference, Workspace VP Aparna Pappu noted that it would likely be a more useful tool on the platform where It was not You have access to a full keyboard but also require a more AI responsive partner.
“As you can imagine, mobile creates a whole bunch of constraints. Sometimes you’re online, sometimes you’re offline. You really don’t want to overwhelm things,” Babu said. “And so we would expect people to use much shorter prompts. When they ask AI to help them type on a mobile phone, we had to fine-tune our experience there to create the best possible output with as little input as possible.”
One of the fun surprises on Gmail is the “I’m Lucky” button when it uses artificial intelligence to generate responses. Babu notes that sometimes he will write you a haiku, and other times, he will type your response in a pirate voice. cheerful? certainly. useful? R, dude, I’m going to say no.
But, of course, Google had a lot to promise. In particular, a Workspace/Duet feature called Sidekick, which Pappu described at I/O as “the future of AI collaboration” (although there’s no date on when it might be available to users.)
In appearance, it looks like a side panel capable of analyzing the document you’re looking at. Google promises that it will not only be able to respond to inquiries about the content, but also suggest its own. So, for example, if you’re writing a story, he might suggest that you create some images to illustrate it. In another example, the user is writing an email about upcoming good luck. Sidekick not only analyzes the contents of an email thread, but it also looks at associated documents—including, in this case, the list of dishes served—and can suggest a good accompaniment.
Overall, it’s not a huge step forward for what Google promises, it’s just a way to tie in existing capabilities. We’ll be waiting some more time to come, it seems.
Updated Wednesday, May 10 10:56:56: More details added on Google Sidekick.
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