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> 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.
> Which leaves me wondering if this is more of a fluff piece
I feel like everything is becoming a fluff piece these days. Hypebeasts for everything seems to be the trend.
> 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'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.
When you have billions of users, nothing is simple
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.
$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?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849457/google-duet-ai-d...
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.
They think this is more valuable than all of the other existing Google Workspace features? Because it's more expensive than all of them AFAIK...
Pricing options:
$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)
"$30, at least for large organizations."
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.
Matches Microsoft pricing for Copilot, smart.
>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
Being gated behind a waitlist is much closer to a closed-beta than "generally available"
The new chat interface looks very interesting. Basically a Slack / Teams clone? They even call the video chat within it "Huddles" like Slack.
Edit: Looks like this launched today as well: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/welc...
A new chat app from Google? Is it Tuesday already?
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.”
Have we though? Have we all “been there”?
It does not seem to be available. I have already requested access a long time (back in April) but still nothing. I requested it again.
Does anybody know how to get an access to it? Is there some invitation code?
> Meetings you’ll love — even the ones you miss
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!
Google just being a typical panicked corporation here. Nothing to see until they actually make the thing generally available to the public.
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?
> Bard is currently available in more than 40 languages and over 230 countries and territories.
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.
> 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?
Duet is apparently the new Clippy for Google.
They are also going to release it for GCP later this year???
> Complete the below form, and a member of our team will contact you.
Instant turn off.
EDIT: for a GA product
That’s a lot of marketing waffle to basically say it’s ChatGPT but trained on your google sheets, files and email.
ChatGPT is great, but could become what Slack is to Teams. Proximity to the users tend to win out.
So this is Googles panic response to yesterdays ChatGPT enterprise announcement?
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.)
This is going to crush so many companies, starting with Nylas
Why does it crush Nylas in particular? They're still a unified API for email/calendar - there's utility there.
The inroads into the CI space must be making all of the small CI companies nervous though.
30$, seems like Mountaim View received the Redmond signal
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.
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.
Well, I am afraid it will be either you doing it (with the help of AI), or your client/boss doing it using AI without you.