Google announced on Tuesday that its AI features will be added to a suite of its products including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet Chat and Slides. The features to expect include new ways to generate, summarize, and brainstorm text with AI in Google Docs, generate full emails in Gmail based on a user’s brief bullet points, and the ability to produce AI imagery, audio, and video for presentations in Slides.
Google’s intentions with today’s announcement are really clear, and geared towards catching up to Microsoft and other competitors in the market. How far it can go is anyone’s guess; but it is apparent that the company is clearly in a haste to achieve its goals of catching up to its rivals.
That said, only two of the products mentioned earlier are going to have the AI writing tools integrated into them, and also made available to a group of US-based “trusted testers” this month—Docs and Gmail. However, the features will be made available to other users all over the world towards the end of the year.
Below is a complete list of AI-powered features that Google announced will be available Workplace apps in the future:
- Draft, reply, summarize, and prioritize your Gmail
- Brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs
- Bring your creative vision to life with auto-generated images, audio, and video in Slides
- Go from raw data to insights and analysis via auto-completion, formula generation, and contextual categorization in Sheets
- Generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet
- Enable workflows for getting things done in Chat
Google gave a brief description of how the AI features will work in Gmail and Docs in a blog post:
“In Gmail and Google Docs, you can simply type in a topic you’d like to write about, and a draft will be instantly generated for you. So if you’re a manager onboarding a new employee, Workspace saves you the time and effort involved in writing that first welcome email. From there, you can elaborate upon or abbreviate the message or adjust the tone to be more playful or professional — all in just a few clicks. We’ll be rolling out these new experiences to testers in the coming weeks.”
