Google’s new AI features write text for Gmail, Docs, and more

Are you tired of hearing about AI features coming to your favorite apps and tools yet? Well too freakin’ bad, here’s Google jumping on the bandwagon. In a sprawling AI topic post this morning, the company announced artificial intelligence text generation going into some of its most commonly-used productivity tools, including Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Chat.

If that sounds like “all the stuff Google makes to rival Microsoft Office,” it’s not a coincidence. Google is clearly trying to get ahead of its workspace rival, since Microsoft is set to announce new AI features at its Future of Work presentation just two days from now. Google recently showed off Bard, its conversational AI, quickly following Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT with the Bing search engine.

To its credit, the AI features announced today seem remarkably useful, especially in Gmail and Docs. If you’ve played with ChatGPT as a means of quickly writing generic text, this will seem familiar. Google’s Docs example shows the user input “Job post for regional sales rep,” after which the tool creates a surprisingly convincing full job listing, presumably trained on millions of Google search results for similar strings.

Text can also be adjusted by applying filter-style commands, like “formalize,” “elaborate,” or “shorten.” There’s even an “I’m feeling lucky” button that will completely rewrite your text in a semi-random tone. With the full suite of tools, users will be able to automatically generate meeting notes and input auto-generated images, audio, and even video.

Google says that its AI tools will be available to “trusted testers” in the next few weeks, starting with Gmail and Google Docs. Exactly when it will roll out to the much wider userbase wasn’t mentioned.