Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., gestures as he speaks during an artificial intelligence discussion at Bruegel European Economic Expert Group in Brussels, Belgium on Monday, January 20, 2020. Pichai urged the United States and the Union European to coordinate regulatory approaches to artificial intelligence, calling for its critical alignment.
Geert Vanden Wijngaert | Bloomberg | fake pictures
Google is turning its popular Gmail app into a productivity powerhouse.
Alphabet’s subsidiary is incorporating more applications into the commercial version of Gmail so that users do not need to switch to other applications or browser tabs. It could help keep employees satisfied with the company’s commercial software and not want to adopt alternative services, such as Slack or Zoom.
That is an important consideration for developing the cloud business that increases the advertising core of Google and Alphabet. The coronavirus hurt Google’s ad revenue in the first quarter, but as schools and offices closed, people began to lean more on digital services that could help them continue to communicate, leading to more adoption of the services. from Google, like the Meet call service.
Now Meet will be available within Gmail for business customers, along with Google Docs and the Google Chats service for team communication. In 2018, Google did something similar to Gmail, improving it with simplified versions of Google Calendar and the Google Keep to-do list app.
People can chat and work on documents in the revamped Gmail.
Within improved Gmail, if people are chatting and want to collaborate on a document together, they will get the same real-time collaboration that has been a great benefit of Google Docs. In other words, Gmail will not be “a parallel or low-fidelity universe” like what one might find from Microsoft, whose Windows productivity apps are richer in features than web versions, said Javier Soltero, Google’s vice president who worked. previously. at Office at Microsoft, in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.
Despite the popularity of Gmail, which has more than 1.5 billion active users, Office is still more popular than the G Suite package. G Suite has 6 million commercial customers, and Soltero hopes to change that. He said the company will try to clarify the product portfolios for consumers and commercial users.
“We will not define things in terms of ‘Hey, there is another consumer thing,'” he said.
He also said that Google has accelerated its work in chat and video calls, two areas in which it said that the company had had to make great strides.
The Google Chats tool that serves as an alternative to Slack is getting shared tasks that will be available within Gmail. Chats will come to Gmail on Android and iOS. And people who make video calls on Google Meet, a rival to Zoom, will be able to decide which users can share their screens. Also, after a host expels a participant from the video call on Meet, the person will not be able to call and access again unless the host extends a new invitation.
G Suite customers can opt for the new integrations, and Google employees are considering how to bring them to consumers, a spokesperson wrote in an email.
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