Google I/O: Voice Prompting for Workspace Apps Announced

At the Google I/O developer conference, Google announced it’s bringing a voice-based prompting feature to Workspace apps such as Docs, Keep, and Gmail. These features can help you create drafts, take notes, and search for emails.

In Docs, you can create a draft document using your voice. For instance, in a demo, Google showed that a user can fetch résumé details from Drive, add event logistics from an email on top of the document, and even include some humorous anecdotes.

Previously, users would have to type all this out, and it’s possible that, while typing, they might write short sentences and then various follow-ups, resulting in a multi-turn conversation that took time. Google’s idea is that with voice, you can use long sentences or ask for multiple tasks in one go. Plus, the feature understands when you change your mind and ask for a detail to be changed in the same conversation turn.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that in the future, users will be able to create and edit documents using their voice.

What’s more, Google is adding a way to use your voice to dump your thoughts into Keep, and the app will use AI to turn that transcription into a structured note or a list. Notetaking apps like Voicenotes and AudioPen added this kind of feature a few years ago. Lately, dictation apps such as Wispr Flow, Monologue, and Aqua have built this functionality into their voice-based typing products.

Earlier this month, Google released its own dictation product called Rambler, which is built into Gboard and works across apps.

Besides Docs and Keep, the company is adding voice-based functionality to Gmail. With the new feature, users will be able to converse with Gemini and ask for details like their next flight, the code to their Airbnb booking, or time for their physician appointment.

Tech companies are cramming AI into all products and features, and as a result, users are getting attuned to asking lengthier queries.

In some cases, voice is an easier input method to blurt out long sentences and queries describing complex multistep requests. What’s more, the current generation of models is good enough to understand if users change their mind about something in the middle of a sentence and output the final query accordingly. Google is paying attention to this trend and adding more voice-based features across its apps.