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I am curious how useful LLM based AI will be in Microsoft 365 and Google Gmail, Docs, YouTube, etc. I don’t have access yet to the AI extensions in Microsoft 3

I am curious how useful LLM based AI will be in Microsoft 365 and Google Gmail, Docs, YouTube, etc. I don’t have access yet to the AI extensions in Microsoft 365 but I have spent a fair amount of time with Bard + Workplace plugins. The best experience has been giving Bard a link to recipes on YouTube and getting short text summaries that are adequate for making the recipe. Sometimes queries against my GMail and Docs are useful but still a work in progress. Anyway, I have very high expectations that within 1 year, both Microsoft and Google will have nailed CoPilot-like AI tools for their cloud productivity apps.

sbarre 3y ago
Honestly, I think tools like Copilot 365 will be used less for generating copy or answering questions and more for boring yet time-intensive tasks like meeting summaries, reporting and building slides. Most people I know who work in large enterprises work in a "deck culture" where everything needs slides, and - again anecdotally - no one likes making slides. For many people it's a slow and painful process. If Copilot 365 can take a Word doc that someone wrote and mash it with a corporate slide template to produce a usable, or near-usable, deck that just needs a few tweaks before being ready to circulate or present, that will be a huge win for so many people. I saw a video demo of this recently and it was really impressive. A raw meeting transcript was turned into a meeting summary and that summary was then turned into nice-looking slides based on an existing presentation. All in under 5 minutes. I'm sure it was a controlled environment (the demo was by a Microsoft evangelist), but I didn't actually expect it to be that good. As more and more of these AI assistants appear, I think they will all slowly find their niche like this.
- zulban 3y ago
  > no one likes making slides. I'm not sure about that. I think there's a lot of people who actually like frequent long meetings and bad slides. That's why we have them everywhere. The rest is groupthink. I agree your use cases are the big wins though.
FergusArgyll 3y ago
I have not had much success with googles "Duet AI" for gmail and docs. It is constantly misunderstanding my emails and email threads. The generative part of it is worse in a way, I use it as a joke with friends, the output is corporate speak^10. I do find it useful when emailing ppl who appreciate obfuscated long emails, I can get company support ppl to treat me well...

sbarre 3y ago

Honestly, I think tools like Copilot 365 will be used less for generating copy or answering questions and more for boring yet time-intensive tasks like meeting summaries, reporting and building slides. Most people I know who work in large enterprises work in a "deck culture" where everything needs slides, and - again anecdotally - no one likes making slides. For many people it's a slow and painful process. If Copilot 365 can take a Word doc that someone wrote and mash it with a corporate slide template to produce a usable, or near-usable, deck that just needs a few tweaks before being ready to circulate or present, that will be a huge win for so many people. I saw a video demo of this recently and it was really impressive. A raw meeting transcript was turned into a meeting summary and that summary was then turned into nice-looking slides based on an existing presentation. All in under 5 minutes. I'm sure it was a controlled environment (the demo was by a Microsoft evangelist), but I didn't actually expect it to be that good. As more and more of these AI assistants appear, I think they will all slowly find their niche like this.

zulban 3y ago
> no one likes making slides. I'm not sure about that. I think there's a lot of people who actually like frequent long meetings and bad slides. That's why we have them everywhere. The rest is groupthink. I agree your use cases are the big wins though.

FergusArgyll 3y ago

I have not had much success with googles "Duet AI" for gmail and docs. It is constantly misunderstanding my emails and email threads. The generative part of it is worse in a way, I use it as a joke with friends, the output is corporate speak^10. I do find it useful when emailing ppl who appreciate obfuscated long emails, I can get company support ppl to treat me well...