It seems Google is pretty happy with the state of its Gemini model at the moment because it’s inserting AI features into every product it has lately. This time, Workspace is getting the AI refresh, with new features coming to Docs, Sheets, Vids, Meet, and Chat — along with a new “agentic AI” feature called Workspace Flows.
First up, Docs is getting new audio and AI writing capabilities. The podcast feature first used in NotebookLM received a lot of praise, and now it’s starting to appear in more places. It came to Gemini a few weeks ago, and now it’s coming to Google Docs in a few weeks.
If you haven’t heard about it, audio overviews are basically AI-generated summaries of your document but presented in a new way — instead of text, you get a podcast hosted by two AI personas. It sounds quite out there, but Google says it’s had great feedback and there are plenty of people online talking about how great it is for multitasking.
As well as the podcast-style overviews, you can also get an audio version of your document as is. This is meant to help you spot any weird phrasing in your writing or check through a document without actually sitting down and reading it.
The second feature for Docs is Help me refine, and Google says it’s more than just a text-generating tool. Instead, the model has been trained to offer “thoughtful suggestions” to improve both your language and the content of your writing — encouraging you to engage in the process and develop your skills as a writer and communicator.
Tools that “force” you to do something properly like this can be a little unpopular with some users — since there are plenty of LLMs that will just fix everything for you, it can seem a little condescending for Google to decide you need to put some work in yourself.
However, if you can see past this, it likely really is a better way to utilize an AI writing tool. Offloading tasks to AI can quickly affect your own abilities, and while writing assistance can help speed tasks up, most people will still have to spend a lot of time writing documents. It would frankly suck to spend so much time on something just to find your skills degrading rather than improving.
Either way, if this feature works well, Grammarly might not be so pleased — most people won’t want two different programs highlighting their typos at the same time, so one or the other will probably get the boot.
Moving on to the other features, we’ve got the Help me analyze bot in Google Sheets, built to help you spot patterns and interesting trends in your data that you might have missed. If you’re not sure how to get the results you want, it can point you in the right direction — saving you time while making sure it doesn’t also waste time by taking control and generating charts that aren’t quite what you need.
Vids is also getting access to in-app video generation, and Meet is adding a personal in-meeting advisor to help you catch up on discussions you missed or draft a point you want to make before saying it. If you have a long discussion in Chat, Gemini will soon be available for you to @ and ask for a summary.
And lastly, Workspace is getting access to its own AI agents, allowing teams to build new automatic processes that help streamline work. These agents, known as Gems, can look at the documents in your Drive for context and guidance to inform its decisions.
The example Google shows off is a customer support Gem that can review request forms, understand the issue, research solutions, draft a reply, and flag it for a team member to review and send. Again, the design of the tool focuses on not going too far, always seeking out human input before it makes any mistakes that could drastically reduce its effectiveness as a time-saving tool.
It looks like there will be a staggered release for all of these features, with most coming in the next couple of weeks or months, and the Sheets feature coming later in the year.
