The venerable category of software known as the office suite has always been about creating stuff, from text documents to spreadsheets to presentations. Thanks to the rapid deployment of generative AI, suites are about to volunteer to handle a sizable percentage of that creation themselves. And today, Google is getting a head start on this trend by previewing an array of new AI-powered features it’s building into its Google Workspace suite.
These features won’t arrive all at once, and at first, they’ll be available only to “trusted testers.” The earliest wave will include writing tools that allow Gmail and Google Docs to auto-compose text based on a prompt you supply, such as a request for a team thank-you note or a job description. Along with generating wordage from scratch, Gmail and Docs will also be able to rewrite prose you’ve already composed. And you’ll be able to adjust the style of their AI-generated text—for instance, to take its creativity up a notch or make it more straightforward.
Google says it’s working on further AI features for Workspace, including summarization in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and Chat; translation for Meet, inbox organization for Gmail; image generation for Slides, and formula generation for Sheets. All of these elements are built on the company’s PaLM (Pathways Language Model) large language model, which is also the basis of some new Google Cloud services that will help third-party developers leverage generative AI in their own creations. These, too, will be rolling out to trusted testers before reaching general availability.
Even by the extremely newsy standards of generative AI, this is shaping up to be one of the newsiest weeks so far. On Thursday, Microsoft is live-streaming an event called “Reinventing Productivity with AI.” Hosted by CEO Satya Nadella and “modern work and business applications” VP Jared Spataro, the session will presumably involve apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and the company’s partnership with OpenAI, giving Microsoft a chance at catching up with Google before most of us get our hands on the new version of Workspace.
As Google understandably likes to point out, all generative AI, regardless of the companies involved, draws on transformer and large language model technologies that were invented at Google several years ago.
Exactly how helpful all this new AI-infused productivity will be remains to be seen. At a Google press briefing about its plans, the company’s examples included asking Docs to come up with a quarterly sales plan, which doesn’t seem terribly useful unless it’s a good sales plan, or close enough that a little tweaking by a human will turn it into one. Let me also say that I will not be thrilled if it turns out my boss has been letting his email program ghost his morale-building messages. The good news is that it shouldn’t be much longer until we all get to judge this impending revolution for ourselves.
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