Google has followed the herd and announced a host of new artificial intelligence (AI) expansion for its is coming to its collaboration tool for enterprise.
The tech giant announced the new Google Workspace feature set, which includes the ability to draft new content and refine existing work in Google Docs , and gives Google Slides the opportunity to generate images from text prompts.
However given that Microsoft has had their finger in this pie since March 2023, and has just announced a similar text-to-image tool for PowerPoint, it’s hard for us to get especially excited about any of this – for now.
Google’s collaborative AI
Everyone’s at it, which is good, I suppose – you’re not beholden to one provider if you’re dying to use the latest tech gimmick. I just wish tech companies remembered that they’re supposed to have original ideas.
But in lieu of that, have this – Google Sheets will now – yawn – analyze and provide actionable insights into your data, with automated data classification and the creation of custom plans.
At the center of this is – yep – AI that can understand the context of your data beyond just the content of a cell. A new “help me organize” function will, even though you’re an adult, generate a comprehensive to-do list based on the homework you need your mum’s help with.
Docs won’t just do your work for you (including grammatically correct, “professional-grade” in French, Spanish, Japanese and “more”) – it’ll use its proprietary “smart chip” technology to help personalize it, so now you can, say, entice bright, inspired job applicants into your web until you finally break it to them gently that the machines are running the place.
Places like gig economy bandwagoner Lyft, that wrote, or had a computer write, without any sense of irony, that “[Lyft] is excited [!] to test out the new generative Workplace experiences [!!]”.
Google deigns to assure us that it continues to believe in the “ingenuity of real people”, characterizing its AI’s work as “suggestions”. It’s all a bit “Gizmo has gone to live on a farm with her other dog friends” to me, but at least, if you’re an IT admin, you’re being given the policy power to make the hurting stop.