Without too much hype, Google has distributed a remarkable changelog about several of the services it has made available for productivity: here are the most interesting news about Gboard, GDocuments, Spaces, and Meet.
Always alongside those who use their tools and services even for work, Google has recently announced several innovations that actually involve some of its most popular services often used in terms of productivity, such as Gboard, Google Meet, Spaces, and GDocuments.
Starting from Gboard, one of the most used apps ever on Android being the virtual keyboard created by Google, the latter has received several updates in recent times. The first novelty has been in recent weeks, with the arrival of the beta 10.3 which has brought an improvement to the function of the suggestions of the elements recently copied to the clipboard, usually displayed in a special bar above the keyboard every time it is copied. something, be it a text, an image, or a link.
With a view to a more open approach to user choices, the “clipboard” item has arrived in the app settings, a section that presents the “Show the text and images copied recently” control in the suggestion bar “, by intervening on which the user can do without the aforementioned suggestion bar.
Also to help the user communicate in a quick and functional way, an improved suggestion function of the most suitable emojis has arrived to include in your conversation which, now, takes into account not only the literal translation of what is written, but also the context. All this is expressed in a button in the shape of a magic wand, inserted above the keyboard: by pressing it once, a single emoji will be inserted at the end of the text as a “translation” of the same while, by pressing the wand twice, a ’emoji between one word and another. For now, the function results in a gradual roll-out and appears to support mostly English language terms.
Moving on to Google Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet), the latter currently supports encryption in transit, but from May it will also optionally support client-side encryption and, towards the end of the year, optionally again for all meetings. From this month, the Reactions arrive, to give quick and incisive feedback, with emojis that will appear next to the thumbnails of the recipients involved in a meeting. Thanks to the possibility (in the coming weeks) to use Meet directly from Documents, Sheets and Presentations of GDocs, you will be able to participate in a meeting and continue editing documents while, thanks to the Picture-in-Picture function (also from April), you can will be able to keep the meeting active in a window while maybe you do something else (eg surf the internet, or reply to an email).
In favor of the Companion mode of Meet comes, for now on the hardware branded Acer, Asus and Logitech, automatic noise cancellation and more: by participating in a hybrid meeting (e.g. with remote participants), those who are in a meeting room, even if taken from the same webcam, will benefit from a personal screen so that they can be best seen by those who participate remotely. Furthermore, by the end of the year, the live-streaming function will arrive, which will allow Meet meetings to be broadcast on YouTube, for example for a webinar.
Even the space for asynchronous sharing of activities and ideas, known as Spaces, with teams now brought to 8,000 participants and soon to 25,000, has not been forgotten by Google which has provided for the display of discussions, inline threading so that by responding to particular comments, side conversations can develop without weighing down or making the main one difficult to understand.
Finally, Google Documents. Here, Big G has announced that, gradually in the first fortnight of April, will be introduced – in favor of Google Workspace users – a system of suggestions (which will be displayed as you type) to write better and faster, which will act in various ways: specifically, expressions that may be inappropriate will be reported and alternative expressions more appropriate to the context will be suggested. Furthermore, the system will intervene on the active and passive form of the speech, and will advise to re-elaborate the sentences in the name of conciseness of inclusiveness. It should be noted that these innovations, active by default, can be deactivated at the user’s discretion.