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.
