Google announces Duet AI, and it’s coming for your Gmail

Google has just unveiled its latest Artificial Intelligence integration — Duet AI. While we first heard about some of these back in March, details and timelines were vague. And it didn’t have a name. Now it’s here for real, and it’s coming for your Gmail inbox.

Duet AI is a generative AI tool designed specifically for Google’s suite of productivity apps. In other words, the ones you probably use for work. This includes AI writing assistance for Google Docs and Gmail, generating images for Google Slides and automatically summarising meetings held in Google Meet.

While we’ve known about these features for a few months now, what is new is the new ‘Help me write’ feature, which will be available in Docs as well as both Gmail’s desktop and mobile apps. It’s an upgraded version of the previously-existing Smart Compose and it does exactly what it says on the tin — helps write emails for you with contextual responses.

While this might sound great for the lazy amongst us, there are also some other practical applications.

During a briefing this week, Google Workspace VP Aparna Pappu said that one use of this feature could be when you don’t have access to a proper keyboard.

“As you can imagine, mobile creates a whole bunch of constraints. Sometimes you’re online, sometimes you’re offline. You really don’t want to fat finger things,” said Pappu. “And so we expect people to use far shorter prompts when asking AI to help them write mobile, and we’ve had to tune our experience there to create the best possible output with the least possible input,” Pappu said.

“Imagine being on your phone and having the ability to draft complete responses with just a few words as a prompt. Our initial launch of mobile will be fast-followed by contextual assistance — allowing you to create professional replies that automatically fill in names and other relevant information,” Pappu also said in a blog post.

During I/O, Google also announced an upcoming Sidekick feature that will summarise and answer questions about things that span across the Google suite — as well as make suggestions.

Sidekick will appear as a side panel that can scan a Google Doc or email chain to not only answer your questions but help you form responses or suggest further inclusions, such as an image.

For example, if you’re writing in Docs it will be able to constantly scan it to provide contextual suggestions. Google used a children’s story as an example, showing Sidekick offering prompts on what could come next.

But before you get too excited, there’s no current ETA for Sidekick.

If this all sounds incredibly similar to what Microsoft announced with its own Copilot features back in March — yes. The competition between the two tech giants is palpable here.

And we’re likely to see more of these similar-sounding features by most big tech companies as AI becomes more integrated. Just last week Slack announced its own AI offerings, including Slack GPT, which also offers summaries pulled from different channels.

When it comes to the rollout of Duet AI, Google is taking a staggered approach. First, prospective users have to sign up for Workspace Labs and join the waitlist.

While Write in Gmail is available from today, Gmail contextual responses and the AI Docs integration won’t drop until the end of May.

The likes of Slides image generation, complex project organisation and intelligent classification in Sheets and Proofreading in Docs will roll out over the coming months.