Google’s generative AI integrated into Gmail and Docs: “It will help write texts”

Like more or less all tech behemoths, Google has also been around for some time active in the field of artificial intelligencealthough it seemed to lag a bit behind the progress OpenAI and Microsoft made with ChatGPT.

It’s not actually like this: as on Italian Tech we have already mentioned several timesthe Mountain View company has been integrating AI into many of its services for over twenty years, with the first uses (for checking the spelling of what we are looking for online) dating back as far as 2001.

Get help from AI with mails, documents and tables

The novelty these days is not so much a new artificial intelligence as the arrival of new solutions within Google Cloud which are based on the so-called generative AI. The one, to be clear, that allows the creation of texts, photos, videos and audio clips practically out of nowhere (it’s more complicated than that and is explained here). In short: Google definitely enters the field controlled by the competition, with some tools that will be available (although not immediately) for ordinary users as well.

This seems to us the most interesting aspect, and here we start: the generative AI capabilities will be integrated into Google Workspace, the set of software composed of (among others) Gmail, Docs (also known as Docs), Presentations, Sheets, Meet and Chat. We will start Docs and Gmail and from Google we have explained that “we will start with a group of trusted testers in the United States”and then spread to the rest of the world.

Some examples practical, to understand: if you are copying in a round of emails with a dozen recipients inside, everyone who has written his own, given his opinion, replied and forwarded, can ask the AI ​​to “catch me up on this email conversation”, that is, to summarize the fundamental concepts, so as not to have to read everything. The result, from what we understand, is a kind of written summary with the salient points raised by each of the participants. Still: in front of a blank sheetinstead of getting caught up in anxiety, you can use the command Help me write (it will be at the top of the page), followed by the topic you have to write about, to get help getting started.

The idea is that people can, thanks to these new tools, create drafts, reply, summarize and prioritize within Gmail; brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs; bring your creativity to life with automatically generated images, audio and video in Presentations; move from raw data to insights and analysis through autocomplete, the formula generation and contextual categorization in Sheets; generate new backgrounds and take notes in Meet; enable workflows to carry out activities in Chat.