Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has announced the integration of AI into the company's products in a blog post.
According to Thomas’s blog post, Google Workspace, the suite of productivity and collaboration tools formerly known as G Suite, is getting a major upgrade with the addition of AI-powered writing tools. The new features, which will be available first to “trusted testers”, will allow Gmail and Google Docs to auto-compose text based on a prompt you supply. The CEO has exemplified the concept with an example of how their “Help me write” tool helps with writing a job description.
Besides generating a draft document or email, the AI will also be able to rewrite prose you’ve already composed and even adjust the style of the generated text, making it more creative or straightforward as needed.
But that’s not all! Google is working on several other AI features for its Workspace as well, including summarization of Docs, translation for Meet, inbox organisation for Gmail, image generation for Slides, formula generation for Sheets, etc.
The aforementioned features are built on the company’s PaLM (Pathways Language Model) large language model, which is also the basis for some new Google Cloud services that will allow third-party developers to leverage generative AI in their own creations.
All of this is exciting news for fans of generative AI and productivity tools, but it remains to be seen how helpful these new AI-infused features will actually be. During a recent Google press briefing, the company provided an example of asking Docs to come up with a quarterly sales plan. While this may sound impressive, it’s important to note that the generated plan will need to be reviewed and possibly tweaked by a human to ensure its accuracy and effectiveness.
As noted, Google will initially roll out the features to “trusted testers” in the US before officially making them accessible to the public.