In the race to commercialise emerging AI technology, Google has announced its own suite of generative AI features for its Google Workspace suite.
In the same week that Microsoft demonstrated its new AI assistant for Microsoft 365, called Copilot, Google shared the news that they would also be adding AI features to their popular apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.
They envisage that the AI assistant – which will be able to generate, summarise, and brainstorm text – will function in a similar way to OpenAI’s popular tool, ChatGPT, which is backed by Microsoft. Like Microsoft’s Copilot, the AI features are primarily aimed at productivity and freeing up workers’ time through content creation, and allowing you to edit and refine the text that has been generated in response to a prompt. You will similarly be able to produce AI imagery, audio, and video in Slides (similar to features available in the forthcoming Microsoft Designer and the popular Canva).
Google also emphasised the ways in which it could boost innovation and creativity – clicking the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ option in Gmail, for example, will “let AI try out a new playful voice altogether”. However, like Microsoft, they added a caveat to the news: “AI is no replacement for the ingenuity, creativity, and smarts of real people.”
However, only the writing tools in Docs and Gmail will be launched soon. In their blog post, they confirmed that these will be rolled out to testers later this month, but it is as yet unclear when they might be made publically available. More than three billion people already use AI-powered content generation in Google; including Smart Reply and Smart Compose in Gmail, and auto-generated summaries in Google Docs.
The early announcement demonstrates Google’s eagerness not to get left behind on the AI journey – particularly after the negative press which resulted from their launch of Google Bard, their alternative to ChatGPT, when experts pointed out a factual error in the information it provided in Google’s own promotional video.