what you need to know
- Google just announced several AI features that are on the way to Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and other Google services.
- AI will be able to summarize content, create suggestions, and rewrite content to help users.
- Google and Microsoft compete with each other in many areas, including the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
- The news comes ahead of Microsoft’s announcement later this week in an obvious attempt to outdo the latter’s advantage in consumer AI.
Google has just announced a new set of AI features for its productivity suite. Gmail and Google Docs will receive the first wave of preview features later this month. More experiences will come to other products in the future.
The features introduced today closely resemble capabilities Microsoft and OpenAI have been working on, such as generating text, composing email, and generating meeting notes. The parallels shouldn’t be surprising, as both Google and Microsoft (in partnership with OpenAI) rush to compete in the consumer AI space.
Coincidentally, the Google news comes just two days before Microsoft’s similarly planned (and previously announced) “The Future of Work: Reimagining Productivity with AI” event on March 16, 2023.
Google summarizes the new features that are on the way in a blog post:
- compose, reply, summarize and prioritize your Gmail
- brainstorming, proofreading, writing and rewriting in Docs
- bring your creative vision to life with automatically generated images, audio, and video in Slides
- Go from raw data to insights and analysis through auto completion, formula generation, and contextual categorization in Sheets
- generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet
- enable workflows to get things done in Chat
Google demonstrated how some of the features will also work in a video. With Chrome, Gmail, and Android proving popular with consumers, Google has a large audience to share AI features with.
Starting this month, those in Google’s trial program who are in the United States will be able to try out AI features in Docs and Gmail. Other features will arrive at a later date.
Only one Google bullet mentions images, audio, or video. Google’s ability to create content in these categories with AI will be key to competing with Microsoft and OpenAI.
GPT-4, the next iteration of OpenAI’s large language model, is multimodal, which means it will be able to output content other than text. The extent of its capabilities is unknown at this time, but Microsoft said that GPT-4 will be released this week.
Windows Central socket
Google and Microsoft are clearly racing to announce similar features and get them into the hands of the public. Both companies have reportedly moved on with presentations, apparently in an effort to be the first to show off particular features. That strategy has had mixed results.
The sudden popularity of ChatGPT and other AI tools caused Google to change its AI strategy, according to reports. Google reportedly announced a ‘Code Red’ and its top management decided to push AI into more products.
While Google is working to compete with Microsoft, OpenAI and other AI tools, the tech giant may need to take a more reserved approach. His Bard ad cost the company $100 billion due to a bug involving the AI tool.
Microsoft’s new Bing actually had a similar bug, but that didn’t draw as much criticism. Google is the established leader in search, so your mistakes will generate more headlines than Bing or anything from OpenAI.
2023 is shaping up to be an interesting year for AI. Consumers will get their hands on some of the most exciting technology to come along in years and big corporations will put pressure on each other as they try to establish dominance in the booming space.
