Google has announced exciting new enhancements to its Workspace tools, enabling its "Gemini" AI to provide comprehensive summaries for PDFs and Google Forms right upon opening them.
Aimed at saving users significant time and effort, the new functionality helps in extracting key information from long and complex documents.
New Features to Streamline Your Daily Workflow
Google revealed that Gemini will proactively generate summary cards when a user opens a PDF within Google Drive.
These cards don't just offer a brief overview of the content; they also present clickable suggested actions, such as "draft a proposal" or "list interview questions based on this resume."
Upon selecting one of the options, Gemini immediately begins executing the requested task within the Drive side panel.
Notably, the feature supports over twenty languages and began its gradual rollout to Google Workspace users on June 12, with expectations for it to become available to all users within two weeks.
In a related update, Google has equipped Gemini with a similar capability for Google Forms, allowing it to summarize responses from short-answer or paragraph questions.
To highlight key ideas and themes, Gemini bases its summary on the form's title, description, questions, and the participants' answers.
Google has stated that this option will appear in the "Responses" tab once a question receives more than three replies.
Currently, the feature is limited to English, with a planned rollout to all Workspace users starting on June 26.
An Innovative Tool for Form Creation
Beyond its summarization capabilities, Google has introduced a new tool within Google Forms called "help me create."
Also powered by Gemini, the tool automatically generates forms based on a user-provided description.
Workspace users can reference supporting documents from Docs, Sheets, Slides, or even PDFs in their prompts, and Gemini will incorporate those details into the generated form.
For instance, a carpentry company could import its product catalog into the feature to create a cost estimate form for clients. The tool will be available in English, with its rollout for regular Workspace domains beginning on July 7.
Streamlining Information Access and Saving Time
According to Google, the goal of these updates is to simplify access to important information and save users time by eliminating the need to manually read every response or sift through every page of a PDF.
Instead of diving into the granular details of documents, Gemini now provides a quick overview with actionable suggestions based on the content.
Google began integrating Gemini into its Workspace apps last year, focusing on making interactions with various files more seamless.
With the latest update, PDFs now open by default in the integrated file viewer instead of a new tab, a change designed to facilitate direct interaction with Gemini.
However, users can still modify this default behavior through their Drive settings if they prefer opening PDFs in separate tabs.
