Unveiling Google's Duet AI: Revolutionizing Gmail, Docs, and Workspace

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. with google io being today that is the day that google is announcing to their developer community all the different new tools they are creating specifically in ai today i want to cover on the podcast how google is integrating ai into gmail google docs google sheets google slides and a ton of other different areas so pretty much their entire work what they call their google workspace and included in that is a new tool they have called duet ai for workspace so today on the podcast, we're going to dive into all of that, what the implications are, if other people are currently doing them, and how big of a deal some of these tools actually are.

1:03So I think what's important is the fact that actually in March, not today, Google announced a bunch of different AI features for its workspace suite of apps. And if you don't know what Google Workspace is, it's essentially like Microsoft Office. It's kind of like the competitor to Microsoft's Office Suite, where companies can have an account and their employees can use, you know, like for Microsoft, it's like PowerPoint and Excel and Google Docs or Microsoft Word and all that kind of stuff. Now Google has their own version of that. And so in any case, back in March, they announced a whole bunch of different AI features that they were going to be implementing into their suite of that.

1:40And that was, you know, them trying to keep up essentially with Microsoft's rapid pace that they're integrating all of these tools into their platform. But today they've announced a host of new ones including something called do duet ai and one of the really cool features of duet ai it's essentially like a sidebar that will appear next to your google doc or your email and it is there to essentially summarize and answer questions you have about the document you're currently working on and it also is good at answering questions on documents across all of your different google apps so it's kind of interesting because it can i mean it's essentially a productivity app.

2:20That's the idea of it. But it also helps to generate responses and AI. So you can ask it questions about things that you're working on. And it has a writing assistant and a whole bunch of other different tools on it. So we'll dive into that a little bit more in a second. But the other one I want to cover was something called Help Me Write for Gmail. And this is interesting because it's going to be on mobile and on desktop. And essentially, you know, in the past, Gmail has had the feature where it will have like a little quick response button you may have noticed Where you can just say like okay sounds good click it and it will send that as an email Similar to like a text message quick response and then Beyond that they also kind of started coming up with this autofill I don't know if you noticed but on Gmail when you're writing an email It will kind of have a suggested autofill for the rest of the sentence that you're working on whatever So now they've brought that to a whole new level with help me write which is essentially integrating ChatGPT or Google Bard as they're calling it nowadays at Google.

3:21And so essentially you're going to be able to have a special button on there where you can, you know, write up, you can have an email that came in and you can have it draft a response to the entire email. And it has a couple different cool features, one of them being that you can select different types of draft. So you can have it draft you an email that's more complex, that's longer. So in the example that they were showing in their keynotes, they showed, you know, if you got an email from an airline saying your flight was canceled and it gave you a$75 voucher, it helped them draft an email to try to get a full refund on it.

3:56And it sent them this, you know, generated this little email and it said, like, make this more like elaborate. And then it, you know, generated an even longer email with more details because, you know, maybe you're more likely to get a refund if you have a more elaborate one. So they have a few different options in there. And those are really cool. I will say the one thing that I felt was pretty dang gimmicky was they've incorporated this I'm feeling lucky button into the Gmail responses. And it's like if you remember what I'm feeling lucky button did back in the day with Google, essentially, like when Google first launched, you could do a search and then you could click on the Google search button and it would do a normal Google search or you could click on I'm feeling lucky and it would just take you to Google's recommendation.

4:39website direct. So now what they've done with the I'm feeling lucky is you when you want to get your email drafted, obviously, it's doing something really similar every time. But if you click I'm feeling lucky, it will do like different, it will do different styles, different voices. So it could draft a response in the style of a pirate, or I don't know, it just like has a bunch of like different random things and it's like fun and whatever like fun sure useful I definitely don't think I'm ever going to want to draft a response to an email in the voice of the pirate so probably not and I mean maybe for kids that are emailing each other does that even happen anymore they might find that amusing but like you know I mostly just use my email for business and for like important stuff so really uh really wouldn't be something I'd ever use so I think that's kind of of funny.

5:34Okay, so the other thing that I think is important to note, they have a whole bunch of different features that are gonna be rolling out in Gmail and, you know, Word and slides and all these other things. I'll go over all of them. But I also want to highlight when they are planning on having these features public because I feel like it's a little bit, I don't know, it kind of rubs me the wrong way, to be honest with Google that they, at the beginning of the year, they had this whole thing where they're like, hey, you know, we're not releasing our AI tools quite yet, because we want to be really thoughtful and we want to make sure that they're really good and we're going to wait till like our AI conferences now it's the AI conference and they do like a couple tools are announced that are going to be available soon like this Gmail thing but a lot of them it's like it's going to be in the coming months and I just I hate the uncertain coming months because you know that Google announced a code red back in January where everyone in the entire organization was supposed to exclusively focus and like crack down on getting AI implemented into all of their platforms because they're worried about OpenAI eating their lunch.

6:32And you know that this was a big deadline. Everyone wanted to get everything done for Google I.O. And the fact that if the tools aren't done by now, they probably aren't super ready. And so they're probably just saying they're saying tools that they are working on that they'll probably get done soon that might work in the near future, but they haven't like actually figured out how to make them accurate and not like tell AI lies yet. So I don't know. I'm like a lot less impressed by a tool someone says, you know, rolling out in the next few months. I know Google is a big, slow company because that's just how big tech companies are.

7:07But like rolling out in the next couple of months, a startup could literally front run like any of these companies could crank something out using like modern AI tools in like a month or two and like come out with the same tools that they have. So I don't know. I'm just I'm less impressed by that. But in any case, let's go over some of the tools because they are pretty interesting. and the fact is Google has the most distribution of any internet company on the planet. So when they roll something out like AI into their search, which they recently, which they are doing, that is affecting a billion people who are searching on Google versus any startup or any other company that is, you know, just affecting a much smaller amount of a group of people.

7:46So the next feature that they are rolling out is Gmail contextual responses. So that is what I mentioned as well. So there's right in Gmail, and then also contextual responses, generate images from text right within Google Slides. So that's kind of cool, right? We have Dolly to from and mid journey, but now we'll also have it. And it's interesting that it's not just like a random standalone product. They're like, where does this really fit? And they're like, okay, it really fits with Google Slides. I honestly, though, can you imagine if they incorporated that into like Google image search, like you do an image search, and it's got like the images you're searching for, but at the top it's like got ai generated ones probably too costly for them but uh i think that could that would definitely have some appeal so that's kind of interesting in any case the other one they have is organized complex projects in google sheets so that'll be really interesting they're using ai to do that and they say rolling out the okay actually everything i'm announcing right now is rolling out in the next couple months so um yeah nothing is other than right in gmail so like where it it'll just like write your response right there for you that's the only thing that's going to be coming out like soon it said today but i checked my app and there's no update available and uh it's not already integrated so probably soon but definitely not now and everything else is coming in the next few months okay um intelligent classification in google sheets by ai custom backgrounds and google meets i think that is i don't know why they would even announce that i think that's kind of silly um ai building blocks in google docs which is going to be rolling out to google workspace labs by the end of the month apparently and um proofreading in docs which is rolling out in the coming months which why does a proofreading functionality take a couple more months to roll out i do not know i can't tell you um like this is grammarly essentially, but using AI, which ChadGPD already does.

9:45So I'm assuming Google Bart already does. I'm not sure, you know, I bet they had a real big push to get it done now. It's not done. So in the coming months, whatever that means. Sorry, I'll try to stave off a little pessimism on Google's thing. They did announce some cool things. Obviously, the integration into Gmail is really cool. And also, I do imagine that that Gmail integration is going to kill a lot of startups I know a lot of people were working on different Gmail plugins and tools to integrate AI however maybe it won't because you know maybe people don't want Google Bard writing their email maybe they want ChatGPT or another you know Anthropoc or some other AI model to do it so I guess that'll be left to to be seen what they recently did say was kind of talking about integrating this into Gmail.

10:35You know, we do know that Microsoft already launched something pretty similar in April, integrating Bing into the Swift keyboard app for iOS and Android. And so I think that, you know, it's not something that's completely new for Google. Other people have done similar tools. A lot of startups, as I mentioned, are already doing that, which now I'm assuming will just be dead. But this is what they said about it. As you can imagine, mobile creates a whole bunch of constraints. Sometimes you're online, sometimes you're offline, you really don't want to fat finger things. And so we expect people to use far shorter prompts when asking AI to help them write mobile.

11:13And we've had to tune our experiences there to create the best possible outputs with the least possible input. So something I will say just based off of that, we do know that they are making specific changes on mobile versus desktop. So I'll be really curious to see when these things actually roll out if the mobile versions have far less functionality or if they've really found a way to dummy these things down this is a classic problem every software company struggles with how much more are you able to do on desktop how do you get all the desktop features available on mobile and it's going to be really interesting to see how google is able to pull this off traditionally they've been quite good at this with all their other suite of google apps so i'll definitely be impressed and if they can pull it off and i'll be looking forward to seeing what they do with this in the future.