Skip to main content

Google brings AI to your G Suite to help you fill out your Docs and Sheets

google g suite integrates ai store pop up nyc 1
Malarie Gokey/Digital Trends
Just two weeks ago Google re-branded their productivity suite, formerly Google for Work, as the new and improved G Suite. On Wednesday, Google revealed a host of new features for the G Suite aimed at improving your productivity with a little help from artificial intelligence.

G Suite will now use machine intelligence to help you get work done and anticipate your needs. By using natural language processing to read your every written word, G Suite’s advanced AI — think an all-seeing, all-hearing version of Clippy — will suggest action items you can assign to co-workers.

Those action items will be visible right on your Google Drive dashboard, each document will display a badge showing the number of action items you are assigned in a particular document. It is a small change, but a welcome one — particularly if you are sharing Google Sheets and Docs at work.

Related: All your Google Docs are now live in G Suite on the Google Cloud

Next up, G Suite has rolled out some improvements to the popular Google Forms. The G Suite’s nameless, faceless, always-watching, always-listening AI will read the questions you are putting into a form and suggest potential answers based on natural language processing. It is a feature which Google estimates will save you about 25 percent of the time you would otherwise spend creating a form.

Another way G Suite will aim to save your precious time is by letting you perform document formatting via voice commands. Google previously rolled out voice typing for Docs a while back, but they are taking it a step further by allowing you to format, change color, and customize content on G Suite with nothing more than your voice.

Last but not least, Wednesday’s G Suite update will try to keep you from switching apps as frequently, featuring robust integration with the popular workplace chat service Slack. Using Slack, you will be able to bring files from your Drive directly into a conversation or create new docs on G Suite straight from the Slack client.

Editors' Recommendations

Jayce Wagner
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.
Google Smart Canvas gets deeper integration between apps
A MacBook with Google Chrome loaded.

Google is updating Smart Canvas, a collaboration experience that debuted last year in the midst of the global pandemic designed for better collaboration and remote work, with new improvements targeting hybrid work.

The Internet search giant claims that the latest enhancements to Smart Canvas help to improve collaboration and speed up your workflow when using Google Workspace apps, such as Google Docs and Sheets.

Read more
Google Lens is getting Chrome integration to help you find out-of-stock products
Google Lens shopping integration.

Google announced at its Search On event on Wednesday that it's bringing the smartphone functionality of its Google Lens to the desktop version of Chrome. Lens is an app that helps identify objects, and it's installed by default in many Android phones.

At some point in "the coming months," Chrome will receive an update to incorporate Lens-style searching into Chrome. Instead of the old highlight, then right-click, then "search Google for" three-step process, you can search a webpage directly with Lens.

Read more
The 5 best new features just announced for Google Docs
best new google docs features meet

Google Docs isn't usually a focus of the Google I/O presentation, but because of how important work-from-home collaboration has become, it took center stage this year.

There are a number of new features in Google Docs and Sheets, but these are the five I'm most excited to integrate into my workflow. These features have just been announced, and won't be available for a few months.
Pageless view in Docs

Read more