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Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace

336 points| lars_francke | 1 year ago |theverge.com | reply

459 comments

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[+] the_snooze|1 year ago|reply
>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.

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."

[+] bambax|1 year ago|reply
How is AI in email a good thing?!

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".

[+] belval|1 year ago|reply
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.

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.

[+] BLKNSLVR|1 year ago|reply
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.

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.

[+] nharada|1 year ago|reply
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.

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.

[+] macNchz|1 year ago|reply
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
[+] gherkinnn|1 year ago|reply
These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems.

I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.

[+] ape4|1 year ago|reply
I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
[+] registeredcorn|1 year ago|reply
> 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.

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.

[+] lazide|1 year ago|reply
Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important.

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.

[+] dragonwriter|1 year ago|reply
> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails.

Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.

[+] n144q|1 year ago|reply
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work.

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.

[+] mark_l_watson|1 year ago|reply
I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.”

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.

[+] CobrastanJorji|1 year ago|reply
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
[+] nonethewiser|1 year ago|reply
> 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.

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.

[+] danpalmer|1 year ago|reply
I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely.

These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.

[+] verdverm|1 year ago|reply
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need.

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.

deets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706997

[+] hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago|reply
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".

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.

[+] fsloth|1 year ago|reply
I feel quite the opposite.

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.

[+] WhyNotHugo|1 year ago|reply
I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.
[+] thumbnailsketch|1 year ago|reply
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
[+] verelo|1 year ago|reply
Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.
[+] cyanydeez|1 year ago|reply
Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI
[+] exe34|1 year ago|reply
management uses them to fluff up their emails and I use them to boil the emails down to actionable bullet points.
[+] sirsinsalot|1 year ago|reply
I saw a Google AI advert that said:

"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?

[+] seanvelasco|1 year ago|reply
I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost

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.

[+] jakedata|1 year ago|reply
We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.
[+] grajaganDev|1 year ago|reply
Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20/month.

Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.

[+] kotaKat|1 year ago|reply
Cool, great, fun. I have all of the “generative AI” features disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!
[+] echelon|1 year ago|reply
Same. This is bullshit.

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.

[+] bnc319|1 year ago|reply
Do you know how to actually disable these new features (i.e. the elements that were added within Gmail, Docs, etc.)? I'm not seeing where they can be disabled and Google Workspace support was not able to point me in the right direction either...
[+] TuringNYC|1 year ago|reply
I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty/data/?

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.

[+] jsheard|1 year ago|reply
What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2/user/month up as "AI revenue" regardless of how many subscribers actually use those features?
[+] FridgeSeal|1 year ago|reply
100%

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.

[+] saaaaaam|1 year ago|reply
I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated the same error.

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.

[+] bcoates|1 year ago|reply
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.

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"

[+] mattkevan|1 year ago|reply
Wish Google would just fix the Drive search rather than lard it up with AI nonsense. Often it’s easier to ask someone to resend the link to a document than find it by searching.
[+] smallerfish|1 year ago|reply
There are so many bugs and sub-par implementations in workspace that Google could fix. My cynical guess is that the source code to workspace apps is probably a mystery to the current generation of 23 year olds who are tasked in maintaining them, so they change little.
[+] varispeed|1 year ago|reply
I wish they fixed search in general. It is difficult to find emails if you don't know exact keywords that might have been used etc. often even if you type in the right keyword it still won't find the email, even though email contains it.
[+] bootsmann|1 year ago|reply
Worst thing is people sharing files tbh, if someone has a folder and shares you a multiple documents from it you don't get the folder in your drive structure so you have n free files floating around in your drive that you cannot organize yourself.
[+] 34679|1 year ago|reply
I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.

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.

[+] PittleyDunkin|1 year ago|reply
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
[+] jkaplowitz|1 year ago|reply
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?

(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.)

[+] dangoodmanUT|1 year ago|reply
Oh no nobody’s buying your ai vaporware, let’s make everyone suffer!
[+] taeric|1 year ago|reply
I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.

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. :(

[+] urbandw311er|1 year ago|reply
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(

Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?

[+] nly|1 year ago|reply
Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive for family purposes.

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.

[+] insane_dreamer|1 year ago|reply
We have Workspace with Gemini and I haven't yet found a case where it did something useful for me.

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.