Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
They specifically allow you a grammar/spell check and also change tone (formal/informal) and length. Length one I have never used but the grammar spell check is a godsend that I use almost always.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
These features are just so rudimentary you just know a bunch of MBAs from McKinsey came up with them over a 7 month and $25m
I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.
I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...
[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
This is a strategic play, not a revenue play.
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
... back to Fortnite / Minecraft / pr0n / alcohol / drugs ...
"My AI has more friends than your AI!"
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
So... not a biased assessment, or anything.
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.
I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
I've used Apple Mail for years (in addition to gMail). Never had any problems with it. Don't seem to get more spam there than I do with gMail.
The only caveat is no IMAP in the free version, you have to use their apps / web interface.
But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas, but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI tooling as software developers and scientists?
Its more like:
If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool interoperable with my chosen AI.
If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont force it in anyway.
I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in there.
People may dislike AI written code or AI "art", but using AI to talk to other people is just seen as dishonest. It's even worse when it's not all that good.
Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless of if you actually plan to use it or not.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and I've been very happy with it.
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
What a sad future we're in.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." - Vader.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-st...
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
- "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)
- "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)
- "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so $220–$240/year)
- "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)
and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
I used exactly the same prompt with each.
I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well they respond.
Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the LLM a role in its system prompt, and of structuring your prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific. Using it improves response quality (I've tested this myself), and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that.
Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know, I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.
My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"
> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that
When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.
I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find Gemini better than Claude.
Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it forget
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
Here are the details for the Business Starter plan specifically:
Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies (Coming soon).
Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google Workspace extensions.
NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio Overviews, and Q&A.
I'm also milking Google with this.
You can’t get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
What’s the worst they can do? Say no?
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
"I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
I suggest you don't wait too long.
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
Should be good for the workplace then.
Fun fact, a rogue LLM impersonating a human in the 17th century is also how we got the term "imaginary" numbers. It also wrote some truly terrible philosophy but it started with a pithy sentence so everyone remembers it.
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)
Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Compare:
To:
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
There are literally tons of them.
Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?
No idea about Youtube accounts.
# Use Cloudflare Email Routing.
* Point your MX records at their MX.
* Cloudflare forwards email to your gmail.com address.
* In Gmail Settings: "Add another email address".
* Add your SMTP settings in the new account.
* There is no need to configure IMAP or POP3.(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite distracting.
Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are improving productivity.
I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its claws in deep.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
It's worse, because Clippy had no editorial control of what was being produced.
I think there's a group of people who really really want this, and they are probably the last people who should get access to an AI/LLM. Some people will just love this, because they're already bullshitting their way through life and this will just make it easier, it even looks company approved if it's in the tools provided to you.
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
On the video description (the text under the video) click 'Show more'. Scroll to the bottom -> 'Show Transcript' -> it will appear to the right of the video (and you can use ctrl + f on it).
IME this works for ~90% of yt videos (i.e. most, but not all).
Note that yt being frustratingly juvenile, symbols are put in place of words yt considers swear words (this caught me out a few times when using ctrl + f to find sentence that contained a swear word or homonym of a swear word).
"Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the numbers?"
"Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
Apple has reasonable web versions for documents, excel, note taking for when you are not on your iDevice. It has a calendar and provides email. It also has all my photos and other stuff anyways. It also supports custom domain names.
To see if I could move away from gmail I started using apple mail, connected to gmail still. The app is just fine.
I just need to make time to do the migration.
No matter how annoying Slack can randomly be, the text chat part is light years ahead of google. You can actually use it to coordinate work, while in a google-using shop you basically must use all other features to get something remotely resembling what you can do with slack. No pinning in google group chats, seriously?
Ofc google offers you the drive and docs. And "AI" now.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep paying (and paying more).
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.
Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
This is getting tiresome.