Google today announced several tools to
allow businesses to use generative AI as a way to discover and use corporate data. It also showcased how its productivity suite, Google Workspace, will incorporate AI to help write emails in Gmail and
create marketing materials in Google Docs. Other apps include Sheets, and Slides.
The PaLM API, included in the announcement, is a way to build on top of Google’s language models.
The API comes with an intuitive tool called MakerSuite that lets developers prototype ideas and, over time, it will have features that prompt engineering, synthetic data generation and
custom-model tuning. Select developers can access the PaLM API and MakerSuite in Private Preview.
"We’re now at a pivotal moment in our AI journey," Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google
Cloud wrote in a post. "Breakthroughs in generative AI are fundamentally changing how people interact with technology — and at Google, we’ve been responsibly developing
large language models so we can safely bring them to our products."
The latest Gartner data shows that Google held 13.7% share of the global enterprise email and authoring market in 2021,
with $3.4 billion in revenue. The analyst firm also expects the email and authoring market to grow to $27.9 billion in 2023.
AI will provide a platform to start, but Johanna Voolich Wright,
Vice President, Product, Google Workspace, wrote in a post that is the technology is no replacement for the
ingenuity, creativity, and smarts of real people."
A list of AI-powered features that will come to Workspace apps in the future include:
- Draft, reply, summarize, and prioritize
your Gmail
- Brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs
- Bring your creative vision to life with auto-generated images, audio, and video in Slides
- Go from raw data to
insights and analysis via auto-completion, formula generation, and contextual categorization in Sheets
- Generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet
- Enable workflows for
getting things done in Chat
Google’s news comes in advance of Microsoft’s virtual Future of Work with AI event on Thursday.
Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun said last week the event will likely include the release a multimodal
GPT-4, which OpenAI released today, as well as a ChatGPT upgrade for Microsoft 365 applications such as Word and Outlook.
Some media sites have already reported that Microsoft GPT-4 will
be “multimodal" to allow AI to translate a user’s text into images, music, and video. A call canter, for example, could use the AI program to automatically convert phone conversations
between employees and customers into text, according to one report.