Google launches AI assistant ‘Google Duet’ to rival Microsoft Copilot

Google is rolling out its artificial intelligence (AI) powered assistant called Google Duet that will serve corporate teams for $30 (R556) monthly per user. The assistant is aimed at corporate teams and will let users translate their documents into Google apps, including Gmail, Drive, Slides, and Docs. Google has been testing the assistant with more than a million beta testers.

The company revealed several features during its I/O developer conference in May 2023, including a function that converts data from Google Docs into a Slides slideshow or sorts out the data into a spreadsheet in Sheets. It can tackle simpler tasks like creating email responses, spell-checking, and image generation through text prompts. Text prompts can also be used to pull items from your Google Drive and summarise documents.

Google Duet will likely directly compete with Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, which launched in August 2023 and is available at the same price as Google’s assistant. The two offer similar functionality, with Microsoft specifying that Copilot combines large language models with user data in the Microsoft Graph, including calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and Microsoft 365 apps.

For example, users can use a text prompt to ask PowerPoint to create presentations from Word documents and get it to add animations or styles across all slides. Microsoft Word can write up plans or proposals from data included in an Excel spreadsheet, Outlook can summarise emails and craft replies, and Teams can provide meeting summaries and highlight important discussion points.