Alphabet’s Google is expanding Gemini, its AI chatbot, to its cloud platform, introducing generative artificial intelligence to its core products as the tech giant seeks to attract more customers to use its cloud-based offerings. Hundreds of partners and customers flocked to Las Vegas to attend Google’s flagship Cloud Next event, which opened on Tuesday. The Mountain View, California-based $32 billion cloud computing giant announced many new products, as the company’s focus has shifted to speeding up feature deployment using artificial intelligence, and more specifically, generative AI. Google Cloud’s new AI features are the latest example of generative AI’s growing influence across services, apps, and products – both on the consumer and enterprise side.
Here are the biggest product announcements for this year’s Google Cloud Next conference.
Google Vids
Google Vids. (Image: Google)
Google Vids is a brand new AI-powered video creation app for work. With the assistance of AI, you can now create a video based on assets you already have, such as marketing copy or images in real time. Google refers to “Vids” as your video, writing, production, and editing assistant, all in one, and it sits alongside Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It can generate a storyboard that you can easily edit. All you need to do is input an idea and the type of video you want. It then generates a storyboard that you can edit after choosing a style. You can pick one from a bunch of templates and choose the right voiceover—either preset voiceovers or your voice. After choosing a style, it pieces together your first draft with suggested scenes from stock videos, images, and background music. Google says “Vids” is an entirely new platform that can help anyone become a “great storyteller at work.” Vids will be released to Workspace Labs in June.
Polish draft in Gmail
Polished draft in Gmail mobile. (Image: Google)
An email is the best communication tool, but finding the right words and tone can be challenging for many, especially when short on time. That’s where Gmail’s new Polish draft feature comes in. As the name suggests, the feature, which is Google Gemini-enabled, helps you craft better emails faster, taking care of grammar and language. It’s coming to Gmail mobile.
Gemini comes to Google Meet, Chat
Google Chat gets an AI-powered teammate. (Image: Google)
Meet, Google’s collaborative video calling platform, is getting two new AI-powered features. One is Translate for Me, which will automatically detect and translate captions in Meet with support for 69 languages. All the heavy work will be done by Gemini, and the AI chatbot will translate captions for you. Google says Translate for Me will be launched in June. Another AI feature coming to Meet is Take Notes for Me, which means the Gemini AI chatbot will take notes for you automatically and create a helpful meeting summary with action items. A meeting summary is similar to meeting notes where an individual is designated to jot down meeting minutes, highlights, and the most important details and action items from a meeting. Take Notes for Me in Google Meet is currently in preview.
In addition, Google is bringing the power of Gemini to Chat, an enterprise chat app. The new AI feature will reside in the side panel of Google Chat and will summarize conversations, answer questions, and much more. It’s currently in preview and will be available later this year, says Google. The software giant will charge $10 per user per month to access the new AI Meetings and Messaging add-on, which can be added to current Workspace plans.
AI in Google Docs
Tabs in a Doc help you organise information from a single place. (Image: Google)
Google is also beefing up Docs to make it more useful for collaborating with two new sets of AI features. The first one involves adding tabs and organizing documents more efficiently. For example, if you’re preparing for a pitch meeting and outlining your project, you can now use AI to set tabs and have the project description and goals in one single document. There’s no need to link to multiple documents or search through Drive.
Another AI feature coming to Google Docs is the ability to personalize documents with a cover image. With a simple prompt, Gemini will create an image that matches the theme of the introduction to your brand, for example. Both features will be available in the coming weeks.