Meet, Google and Cloud Next: AI Meets Machine Intelligence to Make Video Chatting More Efficient and Customer-Critical

The basics have become pretty good at Gmail, but that is all. Now, Citron and his team have to prove that AI truly can take video chat to an entirely new level. Even if that might mean fewer video chats.

Dave, the senior director of product for Meet, stated that the company was just getting started. “The Meet product is really a turnaround story in a lot of ways,” Citron says. We spent the last few years getting to enterprise grade to be the best cutting-edge video conferencing product on the market.

To help combat the exhaustion of staring at dozens of video tiles on a Meet call, Google is also adding dynamic layouts that offer different sizes and shapes for those tiles. If a bunch of people are in a conference room with a bigger tile, it will be easier to see who is sitting around the table. A Meet feature that adds a button above your slides while on a meeting call is one of the smaller features coming. All of them are coming to Labs next year.

Duet can attend a meeting on your behalf. On an invite, you can click an “attend for me” button, while Google will give you some text about the topic of the meeting. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them.

There are a lot of app-specific features that are called duet. Duet in chat and the internet mean lighting and sound changes along with automated meetings summaries that don’t require much reading.

It is possible that you will never need to show up for a meeting again, if the new tools of Google Meet are as good as they are advertised. At the Cloud Next conference, which took place today, a number of new features were revealed.

The challenge for all of these tools is that the underlying AI models aren’t perfect, or even close, and the stakes are high when you’re working with business-critical data. If Duet misinterprets or invents your company’s sales figures, you are in big trouble, that’s silly, if the Bard chatbot hallucinated a movie that doesn’t actually exist. Duet tries to stay grounded in your data and files, but it is wise to double-check with your partner who is using artificial intelligence.

If you are a workspace user, duet is going to show up in practically all the apps you use. In some places, it’s a separate menu, which you access by clicking the Duet icon in the top-right corner. You can ask for help from within your email or document in other places. Even if you don’t want to, you will probably never be able to ignore Duet, because of Google’s desire to put its newest features forefront and center even when it annoys users.