Duet AI, Google Workspace’s little helper, is now available to the masses

Teased at Google I/O this past May, Duet AI for Google Workspace is now generally available.

As part of a collection of announcements coming out of its conference Google Cloud Next ’23, the company announced the widespread release of its generative AI tool for productivity. Duet AI is Google’s version of Microsoft Copilot, which launched in early 2023.

Like Copilot, it’s a generative AI assistant that works across Google’s suite of cloud-based Workspace apps including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and now Google Chat. Within the various Workspace apps, Duet AI, can help you by generating copy, brainstorming new ideas, summarizing text, pulling together information from email conversations and calendar invites, and creating images and charts for slides.

In short, it’s like having your very own assistant pull together information from across all your work repositories in a matter of seconds.

Gmail and Docs got most of the attention from the initial Duet AI announcement, but today’s blog post highlights other features, including its ability to summarize conversations in Google Meet. In the video-conferencing app, Duet AI can take notes in real-time, identify action items, and capture snippets of video to revisit. Or you can just say “screw it” and skip the meeting altogether, and Duet AI can join the meeting on your behalf, even delivering your message for you.

If you’re wondering how Google accomplishes such apparent alchemy, it’s not without some potential unethical trade-offs. In July, the tech giant quietly changed the wording of its privacy policy, updating it to say it uses public information to train its AI chatbot Bard and Cloud AI products. In other words, it may have been a way of Google retroactively justifying its use of personal — yet publicly available — information to train its models. In fact, a California law firm accused Google of doing so illegally in a class action lawsuit that was filed later in July.

For soon-to-be Duet AI users, however, Google says your data is safe. In the post, Google says interactions with Duet AI is privately held between you and the technology, and that Google won’t use your data to train its models without your permission.

Duet AI is now available to Google Workspace customers as a free trial for up to 10 users for 14 days. Beyond that, Google wouldn’t reveal the pricing tiers just yet, but a representative teased that more details would be available later this week.