For more than two years, you've probably spent most of your time sitting at home, cycling through endless virtual meetings, staring at the webcam of your laptop and talking to your built-in microphone. This means that for more than two years, you've been like a pile of low light pixels in front of others. It sounds like you're shouting in an iron can. Of course, it's not your fault: your laptop's webcam is terrible, and so is its microphone. But Google thinks it can solve these two problems with artificial intelligence**
Google announced at its annual I / O Developers Conference on Wednesday that its workspace team has been working on AI driven ways to improve your virtual conference. The most impressive is "portrait repair", which Google says can automatically improve and sharpen your image, even through a bad connection or a bad camera. Similarly, "Portrait Lighting" provides you with a set of artificial intelligence based controls to control your lighting mode. Since you can't move the window to your left, Google seems to be saying, but you can make Google meet look like you have one on your right. When it comes to sound, Google has launched a de reverberation tool designed to minimize the echo generated when talking to your laptop in a narrow home office.
Many of the basic technologies here come from Google's artificial intelligence and machine learning work on its pixel phone. The hardware of these phones is much better than your ordinary laptop webcam, but the principle is the same, said Prasad SETI, the company's vice president of digital work experience. "We want to make sure that the underlying software does the same thing and we can use it on a wide range of hardware devices," he said
Sety said that with the development of mixed work and telework, the Google workspace team has been thinking about how to make work easier over the past few years. "We want technology to be a driver, we want it to be helpful, we want it to be intuitive, and we want it to solve real problems." This prompted the workspace team to think more about collaboration -- hence the conference tool -- but also about how to make asynchronous work more acceptable.
Google plans to launch a new tool to generate an automatic summary of spaces activities so that you can log in and catch up in the morning without having to read hundreds of messages. It also launched the automatic transcription service of meet meetings, and plans to finally summarize these meetings.
"We want to be able to help people deal with this information overload and use artificial intelligence to do it. Google stands for" collaborative justice "and" fairness, "setty said "A lot of thinking has been done to try to help everyone maintain an equal competitive environment, no matter where they are, what technology they use, or how they work. One of Google's tricks is to help people without getting too involved, or making employees feel that they are being monitored by Google or their employers. The way we think about it is that we first empower users. Then let them choose how to do it Expose some information to their team, and so on. "
As people return to the office, Google faces a bigger meeting challenge: solving the problem of mixed meetings, some in one room and others on one screen. This will require more improvements than good lighting and de-interference characteristics.