Gmail and Google Docs are becoming “smart”: AI coming

Artificial intelligence has become a key element in the current technological scene and Google knows it. After the great success that ChatGPT was (and still is), it seemed that Mountain View had been left behind in the AI battle, but nothing could be further from the truth.

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And the big tech companies have not stopped. The emergence of ChatGPT has prompted Microsoft to respond by integrating the model into Bing and Google to announce Bard, a conversational engine based on LaMDA. Continuing with the trail of new developments, Google announced last Tuesday new functions for Google Workspace.

Gmail and Google Docs, major beneficiaries of this update

From now on, the AI will be our virtual assistant. In both Gmail and Google Docs we will be able to write, summarize and review the texts generated by the AI, just as we could already do with ChatGPT. According to Google, we will only have to describe the topic we want to write about. The AI will generate a draft based on our request and we will be able to alter it to suit our needs.

On the other hand, the same thing will happen in Gmail. From now on, we will be able to generate emails from scratch and adjust the content depending on who we send it to (a co-worker, a friend, your boss, etc). Just ask the system to “generate a sales document” for example, and the AI will do the rest.

Spreadsheets will not escape from this update and Google Sheets will also see several additions. One of them will be used to create formulas and sort unprocessed data, for example.

Google expands on these features in its press release: “Workspace saves you the time and effort of writing […]. You simply describe the topic you’d like to discuss and a draft is instantly generated. With the help of your AI assistant, you can further refine and edit the text.”

Google’s news also includes Google Slides, the company’s version of PowerPoint. It appears that it will use AI capabilities to create visual content from scratch, in the style of other models such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion.

It is worth noting that Microsoft is rumored to include very similar features in its Office suite in the future. By the looks of it, the battle of artificial intelligences has moved into the productivity arena. In fact, Microsoft has already scheduled an event where it will talk about its future plans regarding the use of AI and it will be held on Thursday, March 16.

New PaLM API available

Google’s other big announcements have focused more on developers and business users. The first new feature we have is the PaLM API, designed as an easy starting point for using Google’s language models. The API works alongside a tool called MakerSuite, which can be used to create sample code for developers.

When will we see these new products?

The million-dollar question is: when will Google release these new features to the public? For the time being, the generative functions will be available to a small group of testers in the coming weeks. However, there is still no official release date, so we will have to wait.