Google announced a slew of new products at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco this morning, and more than a few of them concerned G Suite. On the hardware side of things, Google took the wraps off Voice Commands for Meet, a voice-enabled tool that adds intelligence to its Hangouts Meet hardware platform. It allows customers with Hangouts Meet-equipped meeting rooms to say commands like, “Hey Google, start the meeting,” with more to come in the future. Smart Reply, a machine learning-powered feature that uses AI to generate brief, contextually relevant responses to incoming messages, is heading to Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack-like enterprise chat platform. Existing G Suite customers will be able to use it in the coming weeks, along with Smart Compose, an auto-completing email feature that launched in May for Gmail users. “In addition to autocompleting common phrases, Smart Compose can insert personalized information like your office or home address, so you don’t need to spend time in repetitive tasks,” Google wrote in a blog post. “And best of all, it will get smarter with time — for example, learning how you prefer to greet certain people in emails to ensure that when you use Smart Compose you sound like yourself.” Google Docs, not to be outdone by Hangouts Chat and Gmail, will see improvements like Grammar Suggestions, which uses machine learning algorithms — the same that power Google Translate — to recognize stylistic errors and suggest corrections. Google said that it understands simple rules such as when to use “a” versus “an,” as well as more complicated concepts like subordinate clauses. Grammar Suggestions is available to businesses enrolled in G Suite’s early adopter program, and it’ll roll out more broadly in the future. G Suite is also gaining a new tool that can automatically delete malicious emails, remove access to Drive files, and identify users who might have been compromised by malicious third parties. And G Suite Business and Enterprise customers can now choose the region — U.S., Europe, or globally — where their primary data is stored. Google noted that in addition to today’s updates, it has added nearly 300 new capabilities to G Suite in the past year, and that more than 4 million paying businesses — including SoundCloud, Whirlpool, Nielsen, Broadcom, Domino’s Pizza, and PricewaterhouseCoopers — use G Suite. During Google parent company Alphabet’s earnings call this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that G Suite brings in more than $1 billion a quarter. “One of the reasons why G Suite is able to deliver real transformation to businesses is that it’s simple to use and adopt,” Google wrote. “In fact, 74 percent of all time spent in Docs, Sheets and Slides is on collaborative work — that is, multiple people creating and editing content together. … This is why more than a billion people rely on G Suite apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive and more in their personal lives.”
Google has unveiled a raft of new AI-based products to rival Microsoft Word. Machine-learning system Smart Compose, for Gmail and Hangouts, will offer to insert personalised information. The company is also working on an AI assistant called Cortana, which can be used in conjunction with the company’s voice assistant. Google's G Suite will also be armed with a tool that automatically deletes malicious mail and removes access to D files.