These updates for Google Docs and Meet aim to make your work life a breeze
New AI-enabled features come to Google Workspace
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Googlehas revealed new AI-enabled features for itsoffice softwaresuite that should help streamline professional workflows.
Speaking atGoogle I/O 2022, CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted a featureintroduced to Google Docsback in February that lets users generate summaries of long documents. The idea is to help people grasp the most important facts without having to read something in its entirety.
In the next few months, this feature will be extended toGoogle Chattoo, arming users with a bullet list of the most salient moments in a conversation. The feature could be extremely useful for someone returning from holiday, for example, or for high-traffic group channels.
New-look Google Workspace
The updates for theWorkspacesuite announced at Google I/O are the latest in an series of upgrades that utilize AI to either automate processes or improve the quality of the user’s work.
Last month, for example, the company lifted the lid on a range of new assistive writing features for Docs, including synonym and sentence structure suggestions.
The word processor will also flag up any “inappropriate language” (although the definition is slightly unclear), as well as instances in which the writer would be better served by using the active rather than passive voice.
Separately, an update forGoogle Driveallows thecloud storageservice to intuit which documents a user may want to work on at which time of day, cutting the time spent hunting for specific files.
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Lastly, Google announced a new transcription feature for itsvideo conferencing software, Meet, effectively eliminating the need for taking minutes. There’s nothing particularly innovative here, but it’s an update that helps close the gap on the likes ofZoomandMicrosoft Teams.
One of the most annoying Google Calender quirks gets a fix>Google Docs can be crashed just by repeating this word>One of the best Google Drive features is coming to Docs, Sheets
The campaign to breathe a greater level of intelligence into Workspace apps is one element of a wider strategy, announced at last year’s I/O, which will see Google introduce new synergies between its variouscollaboration applications.
The implicit suggestion was that Google plans to lean into the benefits of its cloud-based model to help rival the level of interoperability betweenMicrosoftproducts and services, extending all the way out to the Windowsoperating systemon which mostbusiness computersrun.
The latest Workspace updates may seem relatively insignificant in isolation, but when assessed in the wider context, show that Google is deliberately fine-tuning its software suite to maximize value for time-poor professionals in this new era ofhybrid work.
Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He’s responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.
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