Skip to main content

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

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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Jaina Grey
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jaina Grey is a Seattle-based journalist with over a decade of experience covering technology, coffee, gaming, and AI. Her…
Google Docs will auto-generate TL;DR summaries for you
Google presenting new Docs features.

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.

Read more
5 Google Docs tricks you didn’t know you needed
Google Docs in Firefox on a MacBook.

When it comes to new features in applications we use every day, it can be hard to keep up. Google Docs is no different, with new and updated tools being implemented all the time. If you don’t browse the menus to see what’s different, you can easily miss a newly added, time-saving feature.

To help you boost your productivity, check out these Google Docs tricks that have flown a bit under the radar.
Set up an email draft for Gmail

Read more
New Google Docs suggestions will try to fix your bad writing
Person holding iPad and typing with a split keyboard in Google Docs.

Google is further leveraging A.I. to help Google Docs users write more efficiently. The app, which is part of Google's Workspace suite, will provide helpful suggestions to improve writing style, ensure inclusivity, and avoid unnecessary words through a feature called assistive writing suggestions.

"These new features offer a variety of stylistic and writing suggestions as you compose documents," Google said of the assistive writing feature rollout. "Suggestions will appear as you type and help guide you when there are opportunities to avoid repeated or unnecessary words, helping diversify your writing and ensuring you’re using the most effective word for the situation."

Read more