The Biggest Question About Duet AI and Copilot

pcmag.com:

As I watched the sessions at this week's Google Cloud Next, what interested me most were the demos of how the company's new Duet AI feature is being incorporated in its core Workspace productivity suite. I'm also impressed by how generative AI improves other features such as development and cloud security. But since I spend much of my time in office applications, this grabbed most of my attention, as it did when Microsoft demoed similar "Copilots" for Office 365 earlier this year.

At this year's conference, Google said that thousands of companies and over one million people have used beta versions of Duet AI for things such as generating emails about late invoices and writing blogs. It said that Duet AI is now generally available for Workspace at $30 per month per user. It's surely not a coincidence that it is the same pricing that Microsoft earlier announced for Copilot for Office 365, although Microsoft's solution is not yet generally available. I expect it will be shortly. (Google Workspace still has far fewer paying customers than Microsoft Office. At the conference, Google said Workspace has 10 million, while Microsoft claims that Teams has more than 300 million monthly users, suggesting that Office 365 has considerably more.)

Google's Duet AI demos included producing a creative brief for a marketing department, in which it suggested templates and generated a presentation based on the company's corporate Docs and Sheets.

It showed a new teleprompter feature within Google Meet, with Duet AI taking notes during a meeting and creating summaries about it. The biggest change showed it moving away from prompts and to contextual interaction, such as suggesting creative ideas, or even taking actions on your behalf.

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