When I asked Google’s AI writing aid to draft a happy birthday email to a friend, it left my brain in the dust. I had taken about 90 seconds to craft a decent 81-word greeting. But the search giant’s text-generation feature knocked out a flawless 87 words in a third of the time.
That’s exactly what Google wants to see. The Help Me Write feature that launched in March and was rolled out more broadly at the company’s annual conference last week is a radical step beyond the Smart Reply and Smart Compose tools that Gmail has offered for years to generate short phrases. With the new feature, you type a brief description of the email you want to send—“Wish happy birthday to a friend I made last year in San Francisco.” Then you click a button labeled Create, and a full draft appears. Each one bears a disclaimer: “This is a creative writing aid, and is not intended to be factual.”
Help Me Write is the first of a slew of generative AI features Google has planned for its productivity suite, under the umbrella branding of Duet AI for Workspace. I spent a few days testing it in Gmail and Google Docs to speed up wedding planning and uncover its boundaries.
Though it can rapidly unspool drafts of polite emails to businesses or fluent essays on mundane topics, what I gained in time I sometimes lost through new headaches. Duet’s writing often came across as stiff, it sometimes snuck in gender stereotypes and inaccurate information, and it wouldn’t expound on subjects I needed it to—like drinking games. “We’re still learning, and can’t help with that. Try another request,” the tool too often responded to me.
Frustrations aside, the system will undoubtedly be widely adopted among the 2 billion people using Gmail and the 3 billion using Google productivity software such as Docs. Existing AI offerings Smart Reply and Smart Compose drew 180 billion uses last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last week.
Help Me Write loads via a pencil-and-star button located along the bottom of the Compose window in Gmail or on the left margin of a Google Docs page, and it provides the sort of responses that have become synonymous with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Microsoft is testing a version of that technology in services including Word and Outlook with some business customers. But Google’s Duet technology is the first comparable AI writing aid offered to consumers and built into widely used services.
Hundreds of thousands of English-speaking users in the US and other countries who have signed up for Google’s Workspace Labs have access. They’ve been testing it for job applications, client letters, and lesson plans, says Kristina Behr, the Google vice president of product overseeing collaboration services and generative AI integrations. My “You’re in!” email arrived days after signing up. The AI writing companion is free and has no usage limits, but Google hasn’t determined whether that will be true forever, she says.
My experience with Duet began with it asking me to agree to terms of service. I was to understand that prompts and responses would not be tied to my Google account, but they could be reviewed by humans, so I should watch what I type. I still used it for personal tasks, including helping with emails and speaking scripts for my upcoming wedding, offering up my data in the spirit of informing WIRED readers.