Duet AI for Google Workspace, Google’s generative AI productivity tool, is now generally available.
Duet AI, which has been in testing with thousands of businesses, aims to streamline workflows by providing meeting assistance, document and conversation summaries, a chatbot for Google Chat, and personalised suggestions for Gmail responses.
Aparna Pappu, GM and Vice President at Google Workspace, wrote in a blog post:
With the introduction of Duet AI, we added AI as a real-time collaborator. Since its launch, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used Duet AI as a powerful collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data.”
Duet AI for Google Workspace is priced at $30 per month per person, but users can take advantage of a no-cost trial, which is also now available.
Duet AI’s Comprehensive Feature Set
One broad case study of Duet’s capabilities that Google outlines is of a financial analyst compiling a presentation for a quarterly report. The analyst could prompt Duet to analyse the business’s Google Sheets, P&L Docs, Monthly Business Review Slides, and relevant emails from regional sales leads — and Duet would subsequently produce a presentation with text, charts, and images based on a user’s content in Drive and Gmail.
Another use case is as a meeting assistant, with Duet AI being implemented in Google Meet “to help ensure you look and sound your best with studio look, studio lighting, and studio sound,” as Pappu described it. This means in practice that Duet automatically adjusts lighting, sound, framing and “look” so that users have the most professional appearance and background.
Google Meet is also introducing dynamic tiles and face detection, providing individual participants in a meeting room with their video tiles and names. Additionally, automatic translated captions for 18 languages is a feature being introduced. Meet will automatically recognise when another language is spoken and display the translation in real-time.
Duet will also have meeting note-taking and summarising capabilities — its “take notes for me” function will record notes, action items and real-time video snippets before sending a summary to meeting participants after the call ends. Meeting latecomers can also benefit from a “summary so far” feature, which can catch them up on key missed information. At the same time, the “attend for me” feature enables users who can’t attend the meeting to deliver their insights and thoughts on a topic anyway.
Duet has also been implemented with Google Chat, and users can chat directly with the AI to ask questions about their content, receive a documentation summary, and catch up on the most important takeaways from a missed chat. Google Chat has also been refined with a reimagined user interface, new shortcuts, and improved search functionality.
Users can also switch to in real-time with the new “huddles in Chat” feature. “Huddles are audio-first, impromptu gatherings powered by Meet that help distributed teams come together in real-time without jumping into a separately scheduled meeting,” Pappu expanded.
Lastly, Gmail smart reply is being enhanced with Duet, empowering users to draft longer, more detailed, personalised answers with a single button push.
- Google Workspace Adds New Security and Compliance Controls
- Google Workspace Adding Innovative Meeting Scheduling Feature
Critical Duet AI Supporting Details
Google emphasises the security of user data in leveraging Duet AI, confirming that user interactions with the service are entirely private. “No other user will see your data, and Google does not use your data to train our models without your permission,” Pappu wrote.
Google also announced new capabilities to block cyber threats, create a safer work environment with built-in zero-trust controls, and support for customers’ “digital sovereignty and compliance needs”.
Pappu’s blog also highlighted that Duet AI will maintain Workspace’s “open ecosystem” approach to third-party integration: “We remain committed to its growth through partnerships with trusted technology providers. And this includes partners who are innovating with generative AI. For example, we’re working with Typeface and Jasper to enable marketers to use generative AI to create personalised content at scale, right within Workspace.”
