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.
