Gemini in Workspace: Google’s AI is coming to Drive, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and more

The right sidebar in Google’s Workspace apps is now the center for a lot of Google’s AI plans. The company announced today at its I/O developer conference that it is bringing Gemini 1.5 Pro, its latest mainstream language model, to the sidebar in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and Gmail. It’ll be the same virtual assistant across all of those apps, and the key bit is that it’ll know about everything you have saved everywhere.

The idea seems to be to use Gemini to connect all the Workspace apps more seamlessly. According to Aparna Pappu, the general manager and VP of Workspace, Google users have long been trying to hack Gemini to do complicated, multi-app things: send an email based on the data they’re looking at in Sheets or add a reminder to respond to the email they were currently looking at. And since Gemini has access to all of your documents, emails, and files, it can answer questions without forcing you to switch apps.

In a briefing with press ahead of I/O, Pappu gave the example of searching for information about a New York Knicks game. “I could ask something like, ‘what time do doors open for the Knicks game,’ and I’m not looking for information from the web, which is going to give me generic information. I want information from my ticket, which happens to be a PDF in my email somewhere.” Gemini can find that information, and Pappu said early users are quickly learning to use it as a way to find things more quickly.

Among early testers, Pappu said, a popular use case has been receipts. Rather than dig through your email, your files, and everything, you can just ask Gemini to find and organize all your receipts from across your Google account. “And let’s say you hit on the prompt that says ‘Put my expenses in a Drive folder,’” she says, “from there Gemini can put them all into a Sheet.”

In keeping with so many of Google’s announcements at I/O, the Workspace team seems to be focused on using Gemini to help you get stuff done — and do stuff on your behalf. Pappu talked about how popular Gmail’s “Help me write” feature has been, especially on mobile, where people don’t want to type as much. By grounding the model in your data and not the entire internet, Google hopes it can also begin to mitigate the model’s tendency to hallucinate and make other mistakes.

At least for now, the new sidebar isn’t for everyone: it’s available now to some early testers and will roll out to paid Gemini subscribers next month. But Pappu did say Google is looking at how it could use on-device models to bring the capabilities to more users over time, so your days of hunting through Google Drive to find that old PDF may finally be coming to an end. Eventually.

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Gemini in Workspace: Google’s AI is coming to Drive, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and more #Gemini #Workspace #Googles #coming #Drive #Docs #Sheets #Gmail

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Source Link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24155310/google-gemini-ai-sidebar-gmail-docs-slides-io

At least for now, the new sidebar isn’t for everyone: it’s available now to some… – BLOGGER – WP3, Coming, docs, Drive, Gemini, Gmail, Googles, Sheets, Workspace

Author: BLOGGER