> Today we’re making Duet AI for Google Workspace generally available
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 really wonder if this is just a reaction to the Enterprise ChatGPT announcement. TBH, I was excited when I saw this headline. But to your point, has anything actually changed? Duet has been invite-only for a while now, and another user in the comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37309367) said they requested access in April and still can't get in.
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?
(original commenter) I submitted the Request Trial form from a Google Workspace admin account, and a couple hours later got another email to download a Duet Handbook (20 page PDF), which required submitting contact info again. The bottom of the handbook just had "Contact sales for access"... with a link to a sales contact form.
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.
> This is the first "generally available" feature I've seen that's still hidden behind a "request access" form after being called "generally available".
That seems maybe excessively nitpicky? You need to "request access" to ChatGPT too... Were you denied or ignored when you tried?
I called it out because Google Workspaces follows a very formal process for rolling out features, including a roll out schedule, etc... which are normally sent to Google Workspace Admins. "General availability" has a specific meaning to Workspace admins in terms of adopting new functionality, and Duet isn't following the typical release/roll out process.
Maybe we'll be surprised and they'll email the traditional feature roll out email to Workspace admins later this week
I'll say lots of things at Google Workspaces are behind a whole complex process.
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.
I agree it's odd. They've been showing it off at most of the sessions at the current NEXT conference, and we've requested but not yet gotten access to it.
Somebody is preparing their promo packet and needed to hit an OKR. Launching product on time is harder than just changing the meaning of “General Availability”.
Google is a wholly political organization now, everything can be explained by internal power plays. Don’t look for another source of logic.
As a Xoogler that once worked in Cloud, I was going to reply with the same comments.
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...
Same, I was at the level I was directly working with Directors and indirectly with VPs.
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.)
Leadership is remarkably good at explaining what are wholly self-serving decisions in corpspeak, which everyone gets a laugh about on memegen, but then they still buy the most outlandish justifications hook-line-and-sinker.
$30/user/mo on top of normal google workspace per-user pricing seems like a lot for this. Is it really that good, or is google just trying to cash in on the AI hype train?
By comparative pricing, if this is an equivalent of ChatGPT Enterprise + Plugins, you can take the ChatGPT plus pricing which is public at $20/user/mo and this doesn't look that bad.
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.
Bard has certainly become better over the past few months, and while as a product it is worse in some ways (seems to have a purposefully low understanding of the previous context in a chat) it is up to date with somewhat current information, unlike GPT where you need to pay money to access its web browsing capabilities.
I want to use the best tool and every time there is a Bard update I fire up it and try my last few GPT queries and not once have I had reason to switch.
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.
I don't think that you can compare it to chat gpt like that.
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.
>The best way to learn more about AI in Workspace is to use it, which is why we’re excited to open up Workspace Labs to the public and manage the waitlist as we scale to even more users and countries in the weeks ahead.
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
The copywriting on this page is atrocious, feels like it was written by Barf, er, Bard.
“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.”
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
You send your AI with what you want to share, they send their AI with what they want to share... google figures it all out and we just get emails with the input.
Perfect!
A small aside, it is crazy how far behind Google seems to be when compared to OpenAI with their GPT products. There are lots and lots of companies throwing money at OpenAI and building their businesses on top of them. Meanwhile, Bard isn't even available outside the U.S... let alone any plugins, API access, or integrations that I have seen.
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?
You're right. It looks like they have had a few big rollouts in the last few months. Looks like a bunch of the EU countries are added now. I should have looked a little closer.
I tried it the other day and noticed it still isn't available where I live (Canada) for some reason...
Here’s the most egregious example of Google blowing it I’ve seen. I’ve been deploying some infra on Google cloud - turns out Bard can’t answer a single question, and half the time gives up with the “as a language model…” escape routine.
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.
I don’t think there’s much left to be said about this saga of google. They destroyed search, let gmail stagnant, let YouTube get usurper by TikTok, and the cherry on top is completely missing a once in a species tech that was literally discovered by their employees.
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.
Disagree with YouTube, I think it’s a rare bright spot that serves a different need than TikTok. I think it would thrive if spun out, Google holds it back.
Otherwise, spot on, I just don’t think the execs care about legacy, just $$$.
> But what if you can’t make the meeting and have some input to share? With “attend for me” Duet AI will be able to join the meeting on your behalf, delivering your message and ensuring you get the recap.
So the AI will attend for you and read a message you typed? What if all participants do this?
The agency was probably the other way around. Today is the first day of Google's annual Cloud Next event, so a bunch of enterprise AI product and feature announcements is basically expected. OpenAI would have been aware of that when choosing the timing of their own announcement.
(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.)
Nothing irks me more about the productivity space than the first use case on the blog post:
"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.
> We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all.
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.
"Imagine you’re a Google PR writer and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a blog post about Duet AI for release to the public at 8 AM tomorrow ..."
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"
I can understand that certain situations come up that require an all hands on deck emergency, but in such situations I would argue that the last thing you want is an AI generated failsafe presentation, but to get the necessary people on to fix this situation.
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.
I see your point. I too have been asked to do something unexpected around end of day that ends up taking the night. Over the years, I have learned to say no. It was difficult to learn, but now people understand how to work with me. You're right, inaccurate to say this is not common, I just don't like how the usecase is promoting the worst stereotypes about managers. There's a lot of positive stuff. Ex. you want down time to spend with your family. There are a few calls you think you can skip on. You can ask Duet AI to attend on your behalf and give you summaries at the end of the day, etc...
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 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.
My thoughts exactly. The way this is presented is pretty grim and dark. It's like they're working to bring out the worst future possible. Including, like you said, normalising exploitation as if it's something to be proud of.
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.
This is much less common outside IT. My worry is that this kind of enhancement will normalize unacceptable requests because "just have AI do it and you just need to go over it" will become an expectation.
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?