Google has today announced several new AI features in Google Workspace designed to increase productivity in a hybrid work environment.
The new AI features are designed to help employees bring focus to what matters, collaborate securely, and strengthen human connections across the ways and places work happens.
Helping people focus on what’s important
Using advancements in natural language processing, Google recently introduced automated summaries in Google Docs. In the coming months, Google is extending built-in summaries to Spaces to provide a helpful digest of conversations. Summaries allow you to catch up quickly and easily on what you’ve missed from conversations in Spaces.
To help boost participation, Google is also introducing automated meeting transcription for Google Meet, allowing those who didn’t attend a meeting to stay in the loop, or for attendees to easily reference the discussion at a later time. Google is releasing automated transcription later this year, and meeting summarization next year.
Helping to ensure everyone in the team can be seen and heard
Google is using machine learning to make the meeting experience in Google Meet more immersive and meaningful. In turn, these enhancements can help strengthen human connections in a hybrid work world.
To make it easier for people to connect and share rich content in Google Meet, Google is delivering enhancements to image, sound, and content sharing capabilities later this year. Portrait restore uses Google’s AI to help improve your video quality by addressing issues caused by low light, low quality webcams, or poor network connectivity. This processing automatically happens in the cloud to enhance video quality without impacting device performance.
Historically, lighting has been a challenge in video conferencing but it can make a huge difference in how you show up on screen. Portrait light uses machine learning to simulate studio-quality lighting in your video feed, and you can even adjust the light position and brightness so you’re seen the way you want to be.
De-reverberation, meanwhile, filters out the echoes in spaces with hard surfaces, that can give you conference-room audio quality whether you’re in a basement, a kitchen, or a big empty room.
Live sharing in Google Meet can make hybrid meetings more interactive by synchronizing media and content across participants. Users will be able to share controls and interact directly within the meeting, whether it’s watching an icebreaker video from YouTube or sharing a playlist. their partners and developers can use their live sharing APIs today to start integrating Meet into their apps.
Helping to ensure hybrid collaboration is secure by design
With the recent increase in remote and multi-location collaboration, there’s been a trend toward new attack patterns within shared docs. That’s why later this year Google is scaling the phishing and malware protections that guard Gmail to Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets. If a Doc, Sheet, or Slide you’re about to access contains phishing links or malware, you’ll automatically be alerted and guided back to safety.
Google says they will continue to infuse intelligent capabilities across Google Workspace so that it’s easier for employees to bring focus to their top priorities, fully participate, and collaborate from anywhere. Learn more about Google Workspace here.
