Now officially available to commercial customers, Duet AI for Google Workspace represents a crucial step forward in the tech giant’s generative AI roadmap. To keep up with competitors like Microsoft (Copilot) and Zoom (AI Companion), Google needed an AI workspace assistant of its own.
Duet AI for Google Workspace, initially announced during Google’s I/O 2023 event, is similar to solutions like Copilot in many ways. It can summarize and generate content, answer employee questions, and even streamline creative tasks. Like Copilot, Duet AI is also embedded into the various tools in the Google Workspace suite.
This means team members can leverage their own personal AI assistant to create documents, build spreadsheets, or even host meetings via Google Meet.
But what exactly is Duet AI, how does it work, and what can it do?
What is Duet AI for Google Workspace?
Duet AI for Google Workspace is a generative AI solution that embeds conversational intelligence into the Workspace and Google Cloud portfolio. When Google introduced the solution in May 2023, they defined it as a “powerful collaborator” capable of acting as a source of inspiration, a coach, and a productivity booster.
Duet AI builds on the company’s Workplace vision revealed in March 2023, as well as the generative AI features it had already begun rolling out into Google Docs and Gmail. Trusted testers were initially given access to the tool to help Google gather user feedback.
According to the tech giant, professionals used the AI assistant for everything from project planning to writing outreach emails and job applications.
Today, Duet AI for Google Workspace forms just one part of a growing generative AI portfolio for the Google team. The company also recently introduced Google Gemini, a world-leading selection of large language models in three variations. Plus, they already have Google Bard, the ChatGPT competitor, now powered by Gemini Pro.
How to Access Duet AI: Pricing and Availability
Duet AI for Google Workspace is currently available to users worldwide. If you haven’t tested the service already, you can apply for a free trial here, but you will need a Google Workspace account. Following the trial, you’ll need to sign up for a paid subscription.
Like Microsoft Copilot, Duet AI is available as an add-on to various Google Workspace subscriptions. This means you’ll need to pay for an applicable Workspace account and an extra $30 per user per month for Duet AI. This pricing aligns Google with Microsoft’s approach to offering generative AI services. However, it may be a little expensive for some users.
How Does Duet AI for Google Workspace Work?
With over 3 billion users and 10 million paying customers, Google Workspace has become one of the most popular productivity tools in the world. Duet AI for Google Workspace will take your team’s productivity to the next level by enhancing the toolkit with a generative AI assistant.
It’s similar to how Microsoft Copilot can help users with various tasks across apps like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. The difference is that while Copilot leverages Microsoft’s LLMs, made in collaboration with OpenAI (the team behind ChatGPT), Google has its own LLM solution to power Duet AI.
Like Google Bard, Duet AI initially used the PaLM 2 large language model. However, Google has announced that many of its AI tools and services will now feature the “Google Gemini” LLM portfolio. Gemini is Google’s most powerful AI model yet.
The basic version, Gemini Pro, can outperform GPT-3.5 in various use cases. Gemini Ultra, the premium model (still yet to be released), is even more advanced. It exceeds state-of-the-art results on 30 out of 32 common academic benchmarks.
Gemini will appear within Duet AI in early 2024, and it can potentially revolutionize the AI assistant market. Gemini can even process information outside of text, including voice, video, and images. This could give Duet a significant boost over existing generative AI productivity tools. For instance, Duet AI can tell you if you want to know the exact slide a segment of a meeting transcription came from after a conversation.
Aside from introducing multimodal capabilities, Gemini will enhance Duet AI’s ability to understand and generate text, leading to higher-quality results.
The Features of Duet AI for Google Workspace
Just like the Microsoft Copilot assistant can offer different services and features in different Microsoft tools, Google’s Duet AI adapts to the application you’re using. In Meet, it can create automated summaries, tweak lighting and sound during conversations, and more. In Google Docs, it can help generate creative text based on your prompts or inputs.
Here’s a quick insight into what Duet AI can do across the Workplace portfolio.
Duet AI for Google Docs and Gmail
According to Google, Duet AI works behind the scenes in Gmail and Docs to help you write and refine content. The “Help Me Write” button for Google Docs and Gmail uses Google’s large language model to create email responses and documents. Within Docs, users will see a magic wand button they can click to load the Duet AI interface.
All you need to do is tell the bot what you need, such as an essay or an email, and the algorithm will do the rest. It can even help refine your existing documents or improve your grammar. If you’re writing content from scratch, you can ask for new versions using the “recreate” button.
Plus, users can fine-tune generated content with the “formalize,” “elaborate,” “shorten,” or “I’m feeling lucky” buttons. There are even intelligent chips you can click to modify critical pieces of information, such as a product name or customer name.
Duet AI is also available for Gmail mobile so that you can draft more comprehensive, relevant responses to colleagues and customers with “contextual assistance” on the move.
Create Images and Presentations in Google Slides
In the Google Slides app, Google’s Duet AI helps create new presentations or enhance existing documents with images, charts, and text. The experience works similarly to “Midjourney”. Users enter a prompt after clicking on the magic wand button; then, the algorithm creates 6 to 8 images.
This means you can choose the best option for every presentation. You can also select and refine any image created by giving Duet extra prompts. Since the multimodal solution can visualize new concepts from scratch, the options are limitless.
Moreover, if you need help finishing up your presentation, Duet AI can generate text too. It can create speaker notes for your slides to help guide you through your presentation. You can even implement data from Gmail and other environments into each slideshow.
Organize Data and Insights in Google Sheets
Organizing and analyzing data can be time-consuming, even with an app as convenient as Google Sheets. Fortunately, Duet AI is here to help. In Sheets, Duet AI for Google Workspace can automatically classify data and create custom plans for your business.
The classification tools leveraged by Duet AI allow the bot to understand the context of data in a cell. Your assistant can assign labels to cell data, reducing the burden of manual data entry. Plus, you can use the “Help me Organize” feature to create custom plans for tasks and projects automatically.
Users can simply describe what they want to accomplish to the bot, and the AI algorithm will do the rest. Google says this feature could be ideal for everything from summarizing user responses from surveys and interviews to arranging events.
Improve Meeting Outcomes in Google Meet
Duet AI for Google Meet brings generative AI into the meeting experience, similar to Copilot for Teams. The solution can generate unique backgrounds for your video calls to help you express yourself during conversations and maintain your privacy.
It can adjust your meetings’ lighting, look, and sound to ensure you have more productive conversations. Duet AI for Google Workspace also comes with dynamic tile and face detection to ensure everyone in a meeting room is seen and heard.
The AI assistant can even translate captions into 18 different languages, automatically detecting when another language is spoken. Like many generative AI tools for meetings, Duet AI can automatically capture notes, actions, and video snippets in real-time.
Users can click the “Take notes for me” button, and the AI app will automatically send a summary to attendees after the meeting. It can even help people arriving late to a meeting to get up to date with a “summary so far” snapshot of everything they’ve missed.
Users who don’t attend a meeting can benefit by using the “attend for me” button. This allows the AI tool to join the discussion on a user’s behalf and share their messages. Notably, you can also use Duet AI in Meet Chat, to summarize long message threads, or get instant access to data from a previous conversation.
AI Building Blocks (Google Docs)
The “Help me Write” feature isn’t the only thing coming to Docs from Duet AI. Google is also introducing a handy “building blocks” feature. This enables businesses to create personalized content in minutes, such as surveys, job descriptions and more.
These smart chips are placeholders for information such as names, locations, and other variables. Plus, Google’s upgraded neural grammar models are helpful here too. You can use Google Duet AI to create professional-sounding content not just in English, but a range of other langauges too.
Plus, the handy “proofreading” pane offers suggestions for writing concisely and reducing repetition.
Specialist Duet AI Solutions for Google Users
Since introducing the initial version of Duet AI earlier this year, Google has built on its portfolio with more specialist solutions for specific needs. For instance, Duet AI for Developers can complete code for users as they write, generate code blocks, and functions on demand.
The solution can respond to developer questions in natural language, conduct AI-driven troubleshooting tests behind the scenes, and even offers access to “smart actions”. These are one-click shortcuts to automate tasks like test generation and code explanation.
Additionally, like Microsoft has Security Copilot, Google has its own Duet AI solution for security use cases. In the Chronicle platform, users can access Duet AI to generate summaries of threats automatically, use Google-curated detections to find risks and automate warning notifications.
Duet AI in Google Workspace: Security and Privacy
Like many technology innovations, the growth of generative AI in the workspace comes with security and compliance concerns to address. Like most AI market leaders, Google has shared its “AI principles” with customers, showing them that their data will stay entirely within their control.
While Duet AI can draw information from your databases and other connected tools, that information isn’t used to train any of Google’s bots. Plus, admins and business leaders do have the opportunity to implement controls to influence how teams can use Duet AI.
Duet AI for Developers also comes with its own range of privacy and security features. For instance, users can access VPC service controls, enterprise access controls, and Private endpoint solutions. In addition, Duet runs on the same Google infrastructure as all Google Workspace core services.
This means it’s covered by the same security and privacy processes, the same Workspace ISO 27001 certification, and the SOC 2 report. By next year, Google hopes to enhance Duet AI to a point where it can also support HIPAA workloads and FedRAMP requirements.
The Evolution of Duet AI for Google Workspace
Since Duet AI for Google Workspace was first introduced in March 2023, Google has been working to give its generative AI solution an edge. It allowed thousands of trusted testers to experiment with the tool via “Workspace Labs” before it became generally available.
Additionally, Google has upgraded the AI model, powering its intelligent tools. Adding Gemini to Duet, Bard, and other Google solutions will give the company an edge. However, like Microsoft, Zoom, and others, Google must keep innovating to stay ahead.
The technology leader says it’s continuing to work on its LLMs and AI tools to make them more secure, powerful, and reliable for every user. Duet AI will evolve as new offerings emerge, like Google Bard Advanced and Gemini Ultra.
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