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.

In late March 2023, Microsoft will begin a public preview of their new collaboration app – Loop.

This follows the initial period of private preview (which began in November 2022) and offers organisations the chance to explore, test and give feedback on its features.

The Loop app, which is being marketed as a productivity tool, is particularly relevant to organisations conducting hybrid working, and consists of three main parts: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces.

Its main benefit, in comparison to rival apps such as Notion, is the way in which these elements are integrated across all the other Microsoft products, which many organisations already use in their daily working practices.

For example, Loop components allows you to send content in a chat in Microsoft Teams for your colleagues to add their ideas and feedback to directly. Everyone can edit inline and see instant changes, which are then saved automatically to OneDrive.

Additionally, Loop pages allows users to share and collaborate on multiple Loop components, whilst Loop workspaces track and organise your pages into different groups or sections. This is particularly helpful for large projects, with multiple users able to work on pages and workspaces at once.

Microsoft envisages that, once it becomes generally available, Loop will help organisations to work together more efficiently in co-authoring, brainstorming, compiling data, and managing projects.

If you have a Microsoft subscription and would like to test Loop during the preview period, please contact us. Alternatively, for more information about purchasing Microsoft products, take a look at our list of Microsoft apps and services here.

From 1 February 2023, Microsoft has changed what counts towards your cloud storage in OneDrive for personal subscriptions. In the past, email attachments were counted as part of your Outlook.com mailbox quota, but not as part of OneDrive. Now, email attachments in Outlook.com will be counted as part of your OneDrive data allowance.

Although this change does not affect your Outlook mailbox storage amount (presumably Microsoft mean for emails messages themselves), going forward your OneDrive storage will be used up by email attachments as well as its own contents. Microsoft recommends sharing a link to a file already saved in OneDrive rather than sharing the file itself via email, in order to minimise the impact on your data allowance. This will also avoid duplicate files being saved.

Microsoft has also announced changes to Microsoft 365 Personal or Microsoft 365 Family subscribers from 30 November 2023. After this date, these plans will no longer allow personalised email addresses using a domain associated with their Outlook.com account. To do this you will need to upgrade to a paid Microsoft 365 Business subscription. Existing personalised email addresses will not be affected, although if they are removed after this date then they will not be able to be restored.

Both these changes are likely Microsoft encouraging users to move to paid subscriptions in order to benefit from features such as larger cloud storage quotas and personalised email addresses. The announcement from Microsoft is also ambiguous as it does not address the following:

• Whether these changes impact free Outlook.com and OneDrive accounts, which have a small storage quota (5GB), and will be impacted much sooner/quicker.
• If email attachments from Outlook.com will be browsable from OneDrive, seeing as they are now technically stored there.
• If additional free storage will be added to either Outlook.com and/or OneDrive free accounts and personal subscriptions in order to assuage these changes for end users.

Google has announced that it will remove Google Optimize on 30 September 2023.

This will apply to both the free and paid 360 tiers. Any tests or experiences that are still running on this date will come to an end. If your contract with Optimize 360 currently extends beyond this, it will automatically be adjusted to end on 30 September and you won’t be charged past this end date.

You can continue to run personalisations and experiments until then, but we recommend that you prepare for the switch off by downloading your historical data from Optimize and collating your results as soon as possible. You will be unable to access any of your test or experience inference results once the product is discontinued.

To replace this valuable tool, Google intends to integrate A/B testing (and other functions which help you improve user experiences) from third-party platforms into their new version of Analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which is set to replace Universal Analytics from 1 July 2023.

Google intends GA4 to become a central hub through which to measure and analyse the test results from these integrations. This means that organisations which rely on Optimize may need to find an alternative, third-party solution before the product is turned off. Google intends to share more details about GA4 integrations over the coming months, and we will continue to keep you updated.

It is also worth noting that Google says Firebase Testing will not be impacted by this change, even though it uses some of the Optimize infrastructure.

From 13 February, Twitter is removing free access to their Application Programming Interface (API). They are also removing the paid ‘Premium API’ tier, and will require those who were using this to apply for the higher level paid ‘Enterprise API’ tier.

Twitter will launch new access tiers in their latest bid to monetize their platform. When the API access changes, lots of third-party apps and websites which use it will stop working or will at least have their service interrupted.

Since Twitter first made the public announcement on 2 February, they have now confirmed new access levels, although there remains some confusion after a series of Tweets by the platform owner, Elon Musk, which contradicted part of the original announcements. There will be a new ‘Basic’ access tier at $100 a month, which is limited to “low level API usage and access to Ads API” – to quote Twitter’s official account @TwitterDev. There will also be a new ‘Free’ access tier, which is limited to “1,500 tweets per month for a single authenticated user token.”

These changes were announced at short notice and the message has been confusing. This, as well as other complications and changes in recent months, may result in developers passing on the cost to their customers, or possibly abandoning integrations and projects altogether. It will likely bring about the end to some of your favourite tools, features and accounts – which have relied on free and open use of the Twitter API to date.