Since the beginning of the year,Google has been obsessedwith the possibilities of generative AI, much like the other tech titans. The company is taking the battle to competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot with a program called Duet AI, available across Workspace utilities such as Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Gmail. Testing has been limited to a cherry-picked team of testers, but Google is now amending its documentation to accommodate for beta testing of the Duet AI sidebar ahead of a grand release.
Google is also testing Building Blocks in Docs, which make documents personalizable and reusable, without creating multiple copies of the same file. It also allows reusing elements of one document in another.Help Me Visualizeis the company’s attempt at replicating Midjourney, Dall-E, and other text-to-image AI models. It is available for testing in Slides. In Sheets, Google Duet AI offers a feature calledHelp Me Organize, which defines action plans to sort data and tackle an objective you define. The feature also applies data labels automatically, saving you a lot of manual effort.
Google’s Duet AI side panel in action
Testing has been limited so far, but Google recently sent out communication to its initial testers announcing the launch of aDuet AI side panelfor Workspace apps. The side panel brings even more cool features announced late in August, such asAI features in Google Meet. However,pricing is rather exorbitant, and aimed squarely at conglomerates and other businesses already paying for Google’s Workspace subscriptions.
Communication to the people who signed up for testing also notifies them of several changes in the Workspace Labs privacy and terms documentation. Themodified termsreveal how Google will handle data gathered from testers. The contents of your confidential emails, documents, and other files will not be shared with human reviewers. However, the data from Duet’s AI-generated outputs may be shared with Google and its human reviewers after it is suitably aggregated and anonymized. We hope this means personal identifiers in the data will be redacted, and only information necessary to help improve the AI will be passed on to humans, ensuring your privacy in the process. All these signs are pointing to Google’s AI efforts nearing a public release soon.
