Google is testing A.I. tool that attends meeting for you

Google wants to make users of its new products more productive Duet AI Tools, or “collaborators,” including the ability to write and organize in Docs, Gmail, and Sheets. It hopes to enhance the service by testing new tools that can automatically summarize what happened on a Google Meet conference call or create a meeting transcript.

Duet AI costs $30 per month. But tools for summarizing and transcribing meetings are freely available in Workplace Labs, where users can try out features that aren’t ready for general release.

in a blog post On Tuesday, Google explained that the new conferencing tools are designed to enhance the conference call experience by allowing “latecomers to speed up” meeting reviews, or simply to help those who simply can’t make it to the meeting. Next year, the company plans to add a “attend for me” feature, which would theoretically allow employees to let Duet AI take their place, “delivering your message and making sure you get recaps.”

To address the privacy concerns of having an AI tool attend your business meetings, Google said “you can rest assured that your interactions with Duet AI are your own privacy” and that it will abide by its Principles of Artificial Intelligence Responsible innovation. Any data collected from product use will not be fed into the AI ​​for training without permission, the company said.

Of course, the problem of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time.Although technology has improved over time, the technology sometimes fails to generate correct subtitles, especially in involving accent. Regardless, Google hopes to make its translated subtitles available in 18 languages, with the ability to automatically detect the language being used.

While having a robot answer the phone might seem like a snub to a co-worker, the idea is that it helps increase productivity. It’s part of a larger movement to have artificial intelligence take over many administrative tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-level tasks.

Google isn’t the first company to try to let artificial intelligence take over some teleconferencing-related jobs.In March, Microsoft rolled out a beta version of what it calls “AI Assistant.” co-pilot Meetings and emails can be summarized.

The rise of remote and hybrid work during the pandemic has sparked a renewed focus on productivity and a reexamination of the practicality of meetings. A Microsoft study earlier this year found that many active users of its products spend two days a week in meetings and emailing. wall street journal. This means that businesses spend a lot of money on jobs that don’t necessarily translate into a lot of revenue. A 2022 survey by automated transcription service Otter.ai and Dr. Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science at the University of North Carolina, found that companies waste $25,000 every time they hold employee meetings that employees deem unnecessary. And Shopify, which recently gained notoriety for doing away with regular internal meetings, echoes this sentiment with a new “Meeting Cost Calculator” that calculates the cost of any meeting (a 30-minute meeting between three employees might cost cost to the company) eg, $700 to $1,600).

With an emphasis on productivity, increased efficiency saves money. According to a report by Macquarie Equity Research, if only 10% of Microsoft users tried the recently released CoPilot tool, Microsoft could gain an additional $14 billion in revenue in the first year of implementation.

Finally, Google isn’t claiming that its new products will cause everyone to skip meetings and let AI take their place. People will still play an important role, the report said. “We still rely on humans, and we think this is really an assistive technology that helps people collaborate,” Kristina Behr, vice president of product at Google Workplace, reportedly said at a conference. Forbes. “So, if eight bots show up at a meeting, it’s not going to take as many notes,” she added.