Duet AI for Google Workspace Now Available
workspace.google.com
workspace.google.com
The "generally available" bit doesn't sound accurate. To activate it, you need to submit a "Request a trial" form.
For every other Google Workspace feature in GA, billing, subscriptions, and feature settings is available self-serve in Google Workspace Admin.
This is the first "generally available" feature I've seen that's still hidden behind a "request access" form after being called "generally available".
I'm pretty surprised that Google is breaking their own use of the "GA" terminology. General Availability has a pretty specific meaning to anyone who manages Google Workspace for a company, and the way they're rolling out Duet is not how they typically roll out new features.
Which leaves me wondering if this is more of a fluff piece. Has anyone actually gotten access to Duet yet?
I feel like everything is becoming a fluff piece these days. Hypebeasts for everything seems to be the trend.
Meta launched Threads in like a week, Microsoft dropped new Bing out of nowhere. Both companies support billions of users.
Google is a wholly political organization now, everything can be explained by internal power plays. Don’t look for another source of logic.
Changing the definitions of "GA" and "Beta" etc in the context of GCP is a pretty big deal, and I am guessing some product manager, and others, are playing this game to to be able to claim that they launched this to "GA" for Promo/OKRs/etc.
Now let's see if they have anything to say about their deprecation policy...
I literally had projects blocked because I didn’t provide a promo vision for the Directors to make VP if they funded me. This is business critical shit, my direct supervisor literally told me this. They were angry I didn’t devote any time to showing the promo opportunities. No complaint with any part of my justification beyond that.
Business case was open and shut, low technical requirements, minimal overhead and low cost. All they wanted to know was how to make VP, that’s it.
So yeah, I quit.
(Also to the down-voters who likely work at Google, if you’re not in the room when decisions are made you don’t know how the company works.)
Is great and true, thank you.
Is Google's product org just a total dumpster fire? How can you put out a blog post saying a previously invite-only product is GA, but then have the product still be invite only?
Edit: our org also submitted the google form multiple months ago requesting beta access. My (un)educated guess is a lot of what's in this blog post isn't production ready and they're handpicking accounts to onboard for specific features.
I would be pretty amazed if they launched everything in that blog post in the near future.
That seems maybe excessively nitpicky? You need to "request access" to ChatGPT too... Were you denied or ignored when you tried?
Maybe we'll be surprised and they'll email the traditional feature roll out email to Workspace admins later this week
At my last company I was our Workspace admin. It took 9 months and cycling through three different sales teams to get someone to sell me archive licenses (so we didn't have to pay full rate for former employees or delete everything) even though we were already paying for Vault.
Never underestimate when a sales team gets in between users and business.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849457/google-duet-ai-d...
Hopefully they'll make it like $5-$10 for small teams.
Or maybe not 'hopefully'. If they don't, a better and cheaper alternative will probably appear. LLMs are slowly being commoditized, thankfully.
nah there will always be demand for the best one
Assuming business user features and SLAs + deep integration with all of your google workspace are worth the additional $10/user/mo, doesn't sound that bad for a "today" price and until someone undercuts this.
I think they're actually either signaling they think Bard is less good than ChatGPT with this pricing, or they really wanted to undercut ChatGPT enterprise as early as possible, because althought I haven't seen OpenAI's private pricing I doubt they'd be selling for under $30/m, and you'll have way more work trying to piece together plugins and paying 3rd party vendors to replicate "summarize this google drive folder for me into a slide deck" type stuff.
I will switch the second it is better, but for the coding tasks I need done GPT is improving rapidly and Bard is just falling further behind.
At some point I’ll stop comparing unless I hear of some crazy breakthrough.
$10/month = "Must not be as good as ChatGPT"
$20/month = "Why would I pay for this new thing when I can get ChatGPT for the same amount?"
$30/month = "They must think this is better than ChatGPT." (and they'll give discounts on the back end)
Consider that companies will also be paying for having this integrated to the current tools that employees are using in workspace, will not be a new tool for employees, will be a feature.
And also will not be a new bill to pay for financial teams. For IT admins will be a switch on their control panel, nothing new to have control of the tool for their employees.
Google's definition of generally available is we've opened a google form for a waitlist that we'll forget about in a week.
The CTA button seems to redirect to contacting sales for a Google Workspace Trial.
Seems like someone in the org is panicked about Microsoft's O365 GPT integration
Edit: Looks like this launched today as well: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/welc...
“So let’s see how Duet AI can help you in your daily life. Imagine you’re a financial analyst and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a presentation on Q3 performance by 8 AM tomorrow — we’ve all been there.”
Have we though? Have we all “been there”?
Does anybody know how to get an access to it? Is there some invitation code?
LOL. So now my boss can just not post and have his avatar listen in? The next step is having my avatar join the meeting instead so the chatbots just talk to each other. That should really cut down the hours wasted in meetings
What is the strategy here? Is it just to leverage existing workspace customers and have no real 1:1 competing chat/bot/platform to OpenAI?
Meanwhile GPT is writing Python scripts to call the Google Cloud APIs for me and they work on the first try.
Like your entire business is supposed to be info retrieval and knowledge management and I need to use a competitor product to make sense of yours. JFC.
This is a blockbuster not buying Netflix moment for the history books x100. Google isn’t going anywhere, but the people responsible for this era are going to have really awkward moments coming to term with their legacies.
Otherwise, spot on, I just don’t think the execs care about legacy, just $$$.
I tried it the other day and noticed it still isn't available where I live (Canada) for some reason...
So the AI will attend for you and read a message you typed? What if all participants do this?
They are also going to release it for GCP later this year???
Instant turn off.
EDIT: for a GA product
(That's not to say that OpenAI was making a panic announcement. Obviously they weren't. But seems like they pretty much had a free choice of whether to go before or after, while Google was locked into a preset and predictable schedule.)
The inroads into the CI space must be making all of the small CI companies nervous though.
"Imagine you’re a financial analyst and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a presentation on Q3 performance by 8 AM tomorrow — we’ve all been there"
1. We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all. 2. This is toxic AF. We shouldn't normalize this behavior. Someone does this with me, I will politely tell them to F off instead of relying on Duet AI to have it done before dinner. 3. There's no way Duet AI can handle all the heavy lifting for such a major document without human intervention. Whereas the use case of getting a meeting summary does not need as much human intervention. It's interesting they start with this case.
There are a lot of promises here as well that require a lot more infra than just switching on Duet AI: "And because sometimes it’s hard for remote participants to see everyone in the conference room, or their colleagues appear far away and out of focus, we’re rolling out dynamic tiles and face detection that give attendees in a meeting room their own video tile with their name"
You need people to opt-in to facial reco. You need potentially multiple camera angles, or minimally high quality cameras that allow to to perform the crop and optical zoom into people's faces. You need in-room attendees to sign off on the digital zoom into their faces. People don't switch on their cameras at home because of this, yet in the room they will be ok? Not so sure about that.
All in all. Great feature availability. But it needs a balance of realism and how this will all come together.
I'll speak anecdotally for myself here: I have seen - and experienced - this enough times in my almost 30 years, and I have heard from plenty of colleagues who have also seen or experienced this. These stories come from somewhere.
Times are changing, office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline but you don't have to go back too far - less than 10 years - where this kind of subordinate abuse was relatively common, and it still happens to this day.
I 100% agree with you that it shouldn't be normalized or made light of as part of a sales pitch like Duet AI is doing.
But to say this isn't common (we can argue the definition of "common" perhaps) is just inaccurate in my experience.
AI is here to help us work smarter. Hopefully this creates time to work on more interesting & impactful problems thereby improving productivity. The worst case scenario is if people just end up working more on meaningless tasks.
Remember the "let me google it for you" meme? Not very different if all the manager has to do is ask Duet AI to pull together this report instead of asking you.
I'm digressing. This use case really triggers me.
That way, I earn the trust of the people I like and fall off the radar of the people I don't.
I have also experienced it, but when your colleague approaches you at 8AM to ask if you saw their email last night, it is easy enough to say "No, I just got here." Be the workplace you want.
I think it's worse than ever, just on the extreme of toxic positivity where we all have to pretend we're a family and do constant culture training that doesn't actually help anyone but just enables the toxic people to do culture-fu to practice their toxicity under the guide of "holding people accountable" and "being upfront and honest"
If it's part of the business to have people craft this regularly between 5pm and 8am then there is a systemic problem where AI will be a band aid at best.
You'd think that this is April fools material, but apparently this is how they present their products nowadays. I wonder if this was written by a human.