Google has announced some updates for Google Docs and other Workspace products at the 2022 edition of the I/O developer conference. Coming soon are new machine learning-powered document summaries, helping you save time and stay more efficient. Also in the works is a similar transcription feature for Google Meet, digestible summaries for Google Chat, as well as new visual video and audio enhancements for Google Meet.
According to Google, this new feature for Docs will add what you can consider a TL;DR summary. It will automatically parse the document and pull out the main parts. This marks a big leap forward for machine learning and natural language processing, per the company. The feature required a deep understanding of long passages and information compression and language generation, which had remained outside the capabilities of machine learning models until today.
As for the other products in Workspace, this same feature will come to Google Chat in the next few months, to help provide a helpful digest of chat conversations, and to make group chats easier to understand. Google is even working to bring native transcription to Google Meet as well, so you can catch up on the important moments from meetings that you might have missed.
Other than that, Google also detailed video and audio updates for Google Meet. In the future, Meet will bring up and will adjust lighting intelligently so that even if you’re in poor lighting or using an old webcam. This feature is known as “Portrait restore.”
They’re even testing a new “portrait light” feature where you can select a specific point of the frame and improve the related lighting. This should bring studio-quality lighting over to the app, according to Google. It will work across all types of devices, so you will look your best, no matter where you are.
De-reverberation is the audio feature on the way. This filters out echoes in spaces with hard surfaces, so it sounds like you’re in a mic-ed up conference room.
Phishing and malware protection in Docs, Sheets, and Slides top out the list of announced features for Workspace products. With all of these being powered by Artificial Intelligence, Google says these new features make their products more helpful and more accessible.
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