Google is introducing an innovative meeting scheduling feature to Workspace and Gmail that will streamline the process of organising availability.

Gmail users can offer their availability within the message draft with a distinct Calendar icon at the bottom right of the toolbar.

This icon allows users two actions, the first being “Offer times that you’re free”. The Google Workspace update described this action as follows:

This option opens up your calendar on the right. You can select and insert proposed meeting times directly from your calendar into the email without leaving Gmail. The recipient of the email can then review the proposed times and select one directly from the email to automatically get an email with a calendar invite.”

Time suggestions can only be made for a user’s primary calendar currently and would only work for 1:1 meetings. If multiple people are added to the recipient list, only the first person to book the appointment will be automatically added to the event.

The second function of the Calendar icon allows users to “Create an event”. This speeds up the process of scheduling a meeting and shares the event information in the email.

“Starting the flow opens up a calendar event creation on the right with the recipients and title pre-filled from the email,” Google’s blog described it. An event summary will automatically be added to the email body for users to share easily. If a user creates events from Gmail, they can create them on any of the primary or secondary calendars they manage access to.

The update intends to help users confirm 1:1 meeting times much faster. It reduces the inefficient back-and-forth email admin of negotiating time availabilities.

This could be particularly useful when planning meetings with customers, clients or people inside the user’s organisation whose Google Calendars are not visible.

To suggest proposed meeting times in an email draft, begin composing or replying to an email, click “Set up a time to meet” and then “Offer times you’re free”. To create a new event, likewise, begin composing or replying to an email, and then click “Set up a time to meet” and then “Create an event”.

This feature will be a gradual rollout beginning on July 31, and it will be available for all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google Accounts.

Google’s 2023 so Far

With AI being 2023’s most significant technological trend, it’s perhaps inevitable that Google’s most high-profile enterprise solutions this year have been its Bard and Duet offerings.

Duet AI for Google Workspace is a generative AI productivity tool.

Announced alongside a series of other AI announcements at May’s Google I/O, including the rollout of generative AI for its core search engine, Duet AI was described as a “generative AI-powered collaborator” by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a blog post that accompanied the product’s reveal.

Duet AI was partly a rebranding of generative AI tools for Docs and Gmail that launched in early access in March. The initial AI features allowed users to draft, summarise, and reply to emails in Gmail; write and proofread in Docs; auto-generate media in Slides; create automated insights, analysis and custom tables in Sheets; create custom backgrounds and meeting summaries notes in Meet; and enable workflows in Chat.

However, Duet AI introduced innovative features across the Workspace suite. This encompassed full integration across all Workspace apps and the inclusion of generative AI for Gmail on mobile, named “help me write”, which would draft potential messages and factor in the context of the existing email thread.

Last month, Google Workspace enabled passkeys for over nine million organisations to replace passwords after making passkeys available as an alternative sign-in option for personal Google Accounts in May.

The new sign-in method offered enterprise users a convenient and secure form of authentication via fingerprint, face recognition, and more from their phones, laptops, and desktops.

In May, Google introduced pooled storage and shared drives to its Workspace Business Starter plan to help SMBs.

Designed to empower smaller businesses and startups to scale quickly, Google Workspace Business Starter previously only offered 30GB of storage per user. Pooled storage meant that capacity could be shared across a business, offering greater flexibility and streamlining the workload of admins who manage storage usaGoogle introduced several new updates in February, which included intelligent art canvas features and a Workspace redesign.

In March, Google added various new updates to Workspace, including improved filters on Google Sheets, Google Drive label taxonomy changes, and expanded noise cancellation to more devices on Google Meet.



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