The company also touted new security and data region management tools, and said Gmail’s Smart Compose is now available for business users.
SAN FRANCISCO – Google is adding new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to G Suite as it aims to attract more users to its cloud-based productivity apps.
There are now 4 million paid customers of G Suite, which includes tools such as Docs, Sheets and Gmail. That’s up from 3 million paid customers a year ago, but still a long way away from the 135 million paying users of Microsoft’s Office 365.
Speaking at the Google Cloud Next event here today, Raghavan said that Smart Reply has proved a popular way to speed up email communications, with more than 10% of consumer Gmail replies now kicked off with an AI-written response.
“This is an approach you will see us taking repeatedly: we will build an AI feature on one G Suite product and then bring it to others,” said Raghavan.
Meanwhile Gmail users in G Suite will soon gain access to Smart Compose, an AI feature that was announced at Google’s I/O conference earlier this year and released to consumers in May. It will become available in the next few weeks, said Raghavan. Smart Compose learns users’ behavior over time, enabling the AI to autocomplete email text with suggestions for commonly used phrases, greetings and personal details such as addresses.
Google also offered a glimpse of voice commands for its Hangouts Meet team video conferencing tool, which will be offered to some customers later this year. Users will be able to start a video conference by saying, “Hey Google, start the meeting,” said Raghavan, with more voice capabilities to be added later.
“By embracing AI and enabling voice commands, Google’s strategy is aiming squarely at Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana as the speech assistant wars intensify beyond the home and into workplace,” said Angela Ashenden, a principal analyst at CCS Insights.
“These new features are nice, particularly the security features, but Google didn’t introduce anything that fundamentally changes the game versus Office 365,” said Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “Microsoft looks to be gaining ground at a much more rapid pace.”
