At Google, the era of “generative AI in everything”begins. In addition to the ChatGPT-style features that will eventually show up in Google search, Google today announced a series of generative AI features for Google Docs and Gmail. Basically, Google is planning to release a text bot someday that will write everything for you. He can answer emails and make presentations using just a text invitation. As usual for Google and AI, this has yet to be done and the company says it is only “sharing our broader vision”in this blog post.
Just like the rise of Facebook and Google’s hyper-aggressive response with Google+, Google is in total panic over the rise of ChatGPT and AI text. Just as Google added social features to every product during the G+ days, the future plan is to embed ChatGPT-style generative text into every Google product. Google’s blog post confirms this by creating this announcement as part of a larger plan, saying, “For starters, we’re introducing the first set of AI-powered writing features in Docs and Gmail.”So far, the company has also promised to bring AI to its healthcare offerings and opened up the Language Model API, but we have yet to see a real consumer product launch.
The company says it is creating a “collaborative AI partner”in Workspace and breaking down future features:
- draft, reply, summarize and prioritize in Gmail
- brainstorming, proofreading, writing and rewriting in Documents
- bring your creative vision to life with automatically generated images, audio and video slides
- move from raw data to insights and analysis with automatic completion, formula generation, and contextual categorization in Sheets
- create new backgrounds and take notes in Meet
- enable workflows to complete chat tasks
Google has a video detailing how it will all work, and the bot basically takes on the job of being a manager, sending emails to the team and doing presentations, all with a few text prompts.
The “Help me write”field in Gmail and Google Docs will let you type in the gist of what you want to type, and Google’s generative AI will generate a block of text based on that hint. In the Google example, there is a manager responding to the “sales campaign ideas”email thread by typing “I’m in it”in the “Help me write”box. The Google text bot then sends an email in corporate language that starts with “Hey team! We have a lot of great ideas to work with and I’m excited to see what we can do with them.”Google even makes a management call to single out one person in a five-person email thread (Raj in the example), thanking them (and only them) individually for their contribution to the email. Gmail generated text appears in the reply field,
The user then tells Gmail to “write a short report based on these emails”, which launches a new Google Doc, gives it an appropriate title, and dumps all the ideas from the email thread into a nicely formatted Google Doc, complete with little icons to highlight all the main ones. title. Another sentence says “Create a presentation about the campaign”and the AI fires up Google Slides (a version of Google PowerPoint) with a basic theme template and slides outlining the project’s “objectives”, “key results”, and “milestones”. The wild “Create Images”sidebar in Slides shows that Google doesn’t just want to create generative text, but also wants to be able to create whatever pictures you need for your presentation, presumably using Google’s text-to-image spread model, Imigen.
In another example, it generates merge messages in Google Sheets for each client. You get the idea.