Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president for Google Research, speaking at an AI event.
John Minchillo/AP
Google has released its new AI workplace assistant, Duet AI.Duet AI for Google Workspace can summarize documents, draft reports, and reply to emails.While the AI-powered tool has time-saving potential, it’s not without risks.
Google has unveiled its new AI workplace assistant, Duet AI.
The productivity tool is the tech giant’s answer to similar products such as Microsoft’s Copilot for Office 360.
Duet AI for Google Workspace can summarize documents, draft reports, and reply to emails. I tested out a demo version of the AI-powered tool and while it has the potential to save workers time, it’s not without risks.
A feature I thought would potentially be the most helpful was the tool’s ability to read long documents and provide short summaries.
I asked it to summarize one of my unpublished articles to test how well it worked. The immediate results were baffling.
Duet provided a summary that included several facts and figures not mentioned in my work or anywhere online. It also appeared to invent an expert, along with a random quote and organization attributed to them.
While AI systems are known to “hallucinate” and Google has warned users to be mindful of this while using the tool, the confidence of the summary may have fooled me if it wasn’t my own work.
I tried a few more times to summarise the article and while Duet did manage to write a more accurate one, it also provided a summary that included a hallucinated study by a fake government organization.
The “help me write” feature for Google Docs can also bulletize, shorten, and elaborate selected text. Users can write custom prompts such as “make it a poem.” The features worked OK but were a bit glitchy, often serving an error message and asking me to try again.
Duet seemed to work better when spoon-fed smaller bits of text. It did a good job of summarizing paragraphs or shorter documents.
The “rephrasing” feature included on Google Docs was helpful and worked well for any sentences that needed a once-over. Duet also managed to put together a good draft of a cover letter for a job at CNN and provided a basic draft of a marketing plan for Taylor Swift’s next album.
The tool also works with Google’s Gmail and managed to draft three emails for me: one asking for an extension to a deadline, another requesting a sick day, and a third inviting a new contact out for a coffee.
The emails required little prompting and while they weren’t perfect, they served as pretty good drafts and saved me the effort of writing them from scratch.
Duet AI also works with Slides and Sheets with Google’s AI image-generation tech incorporated into Slides. Users can generate unique artwork for slideshows while Sheets now features a “help me organize” button to create custom plans.
While Duet AI can save workers time by helping tidy up documents or draft emails, I wouldn’t recommend trusting it with anything important at this stage.