Google's Duet AI becomes a meeting assistant, doc summarizer and chat companion
Google's Duet AI, its generative AI-powered helper, is now becoming generally available to any organization using Google Workspace, the company announced today at its Google Cloud Next event. The AI helper, previously in testing with thousands of companies, will gain new capabilities, being able to act as a meeting assistant, a chatbot you can communicate with Google Chat, a document summarizer and a way to add more personalization to Gmail's smart replies, among other things.
The Duet AI will become available at a no-cost trial for interested customers, notes Google.
One of Duet AI's features allows it to create presentations for you using text, charts and images, based on relevant content in your Google Drive and Gmail. For instance, explains Google, a financial analyst could put together a summary of Q3 performance by prompting Duet AI to do the work of slogging through Google Sheets, P&L Docs, Monthly Business Review Slides and related emails from sales leads.
Image Credits: Google
Another use case sees Duet AI being added to Google Meet to help you look your best with studio look, studio lighting and studio sound.
Image Credits: Google
Meet is also rolling out dynamic tiles and face detection that give attendees their own video tile with their name in a meeting room, as well as automatically translated captions for 18 languages where the translation will appear in real time.
Image Credits: Google
Duet AI will also work as a meeting helper by taking notes and sending out recaps. With the "take notes for me" feature, it can capture notes, action items and video snippets in real time, then send a summary to attendees with the meeting wraps. This can help latecomers too, as they can get caught up with the "summary so far" feature that offers a snapshot of everything they missed.
Image Credits: Google
One of the more interesting features, however, is Duet AI's "attend for me" option, which has the AI join the meeting on your behalf. The AI can deliver your message to the meeting attendees and make sure you get the recap after the fact.
Image Credits: Google
Another area where Duet AI can be helpful is in building presentations in Google Slides. The AI helper can now help you write speaker notes based on the slides' content. AI will also support real-time teleprompting in Meet and automatically translated captions.
Image Credits: Google
Along with the Meet updates, Google Chat is also getting a refresh with Duet AI enhancements.
Chat will now feature a refreshed user interface, new shortcuts and enhanced search, in addition to now letting you directly chat with Duet AI, ChatGPT-style.
You can ask the AI helper about your content in Gmail and Drive, get a summary of documents shared in a space, and catch up on missed conversations. Chat's search has also been rebuilt to be AI-powered. This includes a new search results page with AI-based rankings, improved groupings, keyword highlighting, and intelligent search suggestions.
Image Credits: Google
A new AI-powered home view in Chat makes it easier to find work messages. When you want to talk in real time, you can switch to voice chat through huddles in chat -- an audio-first impromptu meeting, similar to the huddles feature in Slack.
Plus, Spaces and Chat will soon support up to 500,000 members.
Duet AI will also enhance Gmail's existing smart reply feature allowing users to draft longer, more personalized email replies with a tap.
Additionally, Google said it's working with organizations like Typeface and Jasper to enable marketers to use generative AI to create personalized content in Workspace, along with other partners.
Despite Duet AI's ability to dig into corporate files and emails, Google says customers' interactions with Duet AI will stay within their organization and their existing workplace protections will remain intact.
"No other user will see your data and Google does not use your data to train our models without your permission," a blog post explains.
Google Workspace today has over 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers, Google noted, making Duet AI's general availability something that could potentially reach a wide audience. Pricing isn't finalized for smaller businesses, but enterprise pricing is $30/mo. per seat.
