With AI becoming more and more advanced by the day, suddenly living in a world like the one in “I, Robot” doesn’t seem so impossible.
Google is one of the most important tools for anyone who wants to search the internet for a new recipe, the name of a song, or to listen to music on their phone. It’s very hard to go an average day without having to use any of the many services that Google provides, especially in the workplace. In order to communicate with your coworkers and clients, you have to send hundreds if not thousands of emails every week.
In 2012, when Google Drive was launched, we were able to become even more organized since we could have access to a ton of documents and spreadsheets. We could even share them if we wanted to, and invite specific people to view and edit our files. With the new spellcheck algorithm, Google uses AI sort of how translation tools work: by taking improper English and recognizing errors to make suggestions as you type. If you have too many photos on your phone, Google Drive can help you with that, too. The service offers secure cloud storage. Now, Google takes organization to the next level with Priority.
What is Priority?
Google Drive’s Priority function was teased at the Cloud Next 2018 conference. According to the G Suite Updates page, Priority is still currently in beta, but those lucky enough to have access to it will see it as the first option in the navigation bar when you open Drive. The point is to make it easier to find certain files and to handle the ones that need the most attention. AI will suggest the most relevant documents in your Drive, since most users only access 10 to 12 files at a time. It will let you know if someone added a new comment or share request, and you can do this all from the Drive’s UI.
Another cool feature of the Priority page is the workspaces. You can grab a few private files and view them from one place so that you can access them faster. You can add a file to the workspace manually or use Priority’s file suggestions.
Google says that the addition of Priority and its workspaces are another step in an effort to “help you spend less time searching for content and more time doing work on what matters.”
There are a few whispers about privacy concerns since we know that it uses your search history and preferences to judge what documents you’ll think are most important. We’ll have to wait until Priority is available to everyone to be sure, but just going off of the awesome functions that we saw in Google’s preview, we think it will really help with productivity.
