Google is rolling out some new AI-powered tools and features that will come to enhance its Workspace solution – the company’s suite of products that are used by enterprises such as Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Drive.
According to a blog post published this morning, the online advertising giant is actually expanding the use of AI within these products as the technology is already being used in many ways to increase the user’s productivity.
However, the innovative aspect of these new tools is the fact that they will be generative, meaning that the AI model will generate content based on the user’s prompts – pretty much similar to what ChatGPT can do but applied to Google’s products.
Here’s What Users Will Be Able to Do with these AI Tools
Some of the things that the company’s generative AI will be able to do include creating summaries out of lengthy e-mail conversations, building presentations with the information it gathered from a meeting on Google Meet, and drafting a response to an e-mail that needs to be sent out to co-workers or subordinates.
When it comes to Google Docs, some interesting use cases have been presented by Alphabet (GOOG). For example, professionals can come up with a summary of what they want to write and they can feed that info to the AI model to come up with a richer version of the document.
One cool feature that Google has added to the AI tool is that its tone and style can be changed from formal to casual and such so users can fine-tune the language used in the documents depending on the audience that they will be addressing.
“Simply type a topic you’d like to write about, and a draft will instantly be generated for you. With your collaborative AI partner you can continue to refine and edit, getting more suggestions as needed”, the company explained.
The announcement comes just two days before Google’s toughest rival in the AI space – Microsoft (MSFT) – holds an event called the “Future of Work with AI” where the Redmond-based company is expected to reveal the AI-powered versions of its flagship productivity software – MS Office.
However, Alphabet is only making these smart versions of its solutions available to “Trusted Testers” in the same way they did with Bard – the ChatGPT-like tool they came up with for their search engine.
No timeline was provided as to when the new version of the products will be made available to all the companies that use Google Workspace and no details on the pricing were revealed at the time either.
Is Alphabet Ready to Offer its AI Solutions to the World?
One reason why Alphabet may be struggling to make these solutions available to everyone is that the company may have not prepared its infrastructure to meet the significant spike in computing power demand that results from the use of AI tools.
In the case of Microsoft, the company has been planning ahead for years and they invested hundreds of millions into building large clusters of graphic processing units (GPUs) that can take the significant workload that these solutions demand.
For Satya Nadella and the tech corporation he leads, AI is not something they stumbled upon. It is a long game they have been playing for quite a while. They seem to be just getting started and Alphabet appears to have been taken by surprise.
It all started with Microsoft’s investment into OpenAI in 2019. The company learned a lot about its experience with large AI models in terms of infrastructure and other aspects and tackled these challenges way ahead of this go-to-market stage.
It remains to be seen if Google can work its way through the fodder. The race has started and one horse seems to be leading the pack.
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