Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace
(theverge.com)329 points by lars_francke 3 days ago
329 points by lars_francke 3 days ago
How is AI in email a good thing?!
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
There's a trend of people replying to posts/tweets/etc. with 'I asked ChatGPT and it said...'
It's the modern equivalent of LMGTFY. The OP could just as easily written the same prompt themselves. The difference is that LMGTFY was an expression of irritation, smugness and hazing. The ChatGPT reply is just garrulous laziness. I expect and hope we'll develop social rules that mean this type of reply will be seen as passe.
My expectation is that:
1: people will use ChatGPT to write their formal emails based on a casually written text 2: people will use ChatGPT to convert their emails from formal text to summaries\ 3: this will get automated by email providers 4: eventually the automation will be removed and we'll just talk in plain language again
You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
A reply of "sounds good" means the initial email has been read and its contents agreed upon. Ho would AI improve upon this?
- sending "sounds good" even when the recipient hasn't, in fact, read the initial email => catastrophic alternative
- writing an elaborate email explaining in luxurious details why it in fact sounds good => not catastrophic, but costing time on the other side to read and understand, with zero added value
it would be the delivery of the information and its context in the whole of your other content analyzed
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
Yes, I'm aware. What AI/Proton provides isn't just a simple spellchecker though. It specifically recommends and alters wording to better suit the overall sentence structure. Essentially, it considers the context better than any built-in checker I've had in the past.
It's also really useful to for words that are spelt almost the same. Suit and Suite for example.
Also throughout my day, I'm constantly switching between 2 languages that have almost identically written words. Adress and Address. The normal spellchecks often don't mark it as an error because my computers and browsers naturally also have 2 installed keyboards and languages.
Maybe you aren't in a space where it would be useful, but not everyone who has to write an email is a great and concise writer.
I worked with groups of tradespeople who had poor literacy and they had to write emails and some of them were very poorly written. AI would have helped these people a great deal in providing information but also being able to understand what was coming back to them.
Formal writing is just that.
Alice: Hey, Bob, I finished the job, pay me
Letter: Blah blah blah, Bob, blah blah blah, $$$, blah blah blah
Bob: Oh, Alice is done, hey Charlie, pay her
Letter: Blah blah blah, Charlie, blah blah blah, Alice, blah, $$$, blah blah
Charlie: Ok, Alice is paid
Letter: Blah blah, Alice, blah blah, $$$, blah blah, bank account, blah
Alice: kthx
Letter: Blah blah blah...
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
My experience with LLMs expanding on bullet points is that they often enough misrepresent my intentions as a writer. Often in infuriatingly subtle ways.
Same when summarizing, just less frequently.
As someone who cares about precision and clarity in my writing, I do not use LLMs in the context of communication.
If you're a non native speaker trying to get the tone just right with recipients whom you don't know, it's invaluable.
Sometimes I would spend 15 minutes writing a 3 or 4-line email of this kind. Not anymore.
> How is AI in email a good thing?!
> There's a cartoon going around (...)
Both frames of the cartoon represent a real perceived need: for the sender, the need to inflate the message to "look nice" because "people expect it", and then for the recipient, the need to summarize the nice-looking message to get the actual point they care about.
Hopefully the use of AI in email will make that cartoon (and the underlying message) widespread, and lead to people finally realizing what they failed to realize all these decades: just send the goddamn bullet point. We don't need AI in e-mails. We just need to stop wasting each other's time.
EDIT: and riffing off rpigab's comment downthread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723756 -- I wish for the future people will feel comfortable, instead of sending AI-generated e-mails, to send the goddamn prompt instead. It carries all the information and much less noise.
I mean, using LLMs makes sense if you actually need to communicate in prose - for many, myself included, it's much easier to evaluate whether some text sounds right, than to write it that way in the first place, so LLMs are useful in evolving and refactoring your own writing (and learning how to write better from it, over time). But that is rarely the case in transactional or business communication - for that, just send the prompt.
Google seems to have an advantage here; as the client on both ends in many emails, they could just check if this ai expand/summary process is occurring and if so just send the bullet point (or if they want to be really clever just pass the bullet point through a thesaurus, so nobody will notice even if the sender happens to see what the recipient got).
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
I get where you are coming from with this, but in my opinion being able to give feedback in a clear and concise fashion is a skill that people should have. LLMs will help you elaborate but they will also add their own flair by choosing the actual work. You can think "wow that's actually what a better person of me would have written" but you are biasing yourself based on what the LLM understood of your prompt focusing on form over substance.
But as the other comments mention it might just all be bullshit anyway.
The interesting thing about the LLM is that it uses its knowledge of our respective roles, overall product (which is public), and peer review process itself to refine and improve the output in ways I wouldn't have considered.
I always put a lot of time into reviews before. Should I not use the tool to make something even better (within realistic time commitment)?
If I use an AI to create some cartoon graphics for a slide, should I have bettered myself by learning graphic design instead?
> that aren't just BS
Having been on the receiving end of many of these, it absolutely is pure BS and I lose all respect for anyone who themselves have so little respect for their colleague's time as to subject them to the AI-written slop instead of actual genuine feedback.
The whole fucking point is to give them actionable feedback, both good and bad, for them to work on themselves, not some generic hallucinated summary of some bullet points you haphazardly threw together. I can copy/paste the review prompt into ChatGPT myself, thank you very much, I don't need you to do it for me and to pass it off as your own genuine thoughts.
If a colleague gave me LLM responses instead of genuine feedback I would never ask them for a review again. Which may be what they were going for. But sadly this is not what I wanted.
Be better. Someone respected your opinion enough to go out and ask for it. Take a minute to reflect.
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
> people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
It's more complicated than this.
The short form isnt actually the best form. It's incomplete. The LLM is being used to decompress, because it can be difficult to do. Blindly using an LLM isn't the solution but it can be part of an effective workflow to write good feedback.
Also, I'm sure some people take a brief, complete idea and expand it into an entire paragraph because they have some warped perception. That's bad, but I dont think most people are doing that because most people dont see any reason to.
I hope it drives a cultural revival in appreciation of laconicism.
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.
Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.
When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.
When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.
"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'
Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)
Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.
Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.
If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.
Thank you for this!
I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.
For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.
Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.
Does your company log meetings as tickets?
Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?
It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're a constant source of "time drain away from actual progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only recently (in the past three years) been really focused on to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.
Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?
Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
I used Gemini to do a similar task and for whatever reason, i found it performed better when i broke down the task into individual steps.
These LLMs are excel at making more. More emails with more words. More blog posts with more fluff. Making it open to more people means more usage means more numbers being more which means more money for the people building these systems.
I don't see what I get out of 80% of these products. It's just more noise.
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely
That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).
Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
Well, that’s because you’re thinking as someone who likely has a stake in quality/specific outcomes actually happening. Or was raised/grew up in an environment where that was important.
Notably, in my experience there is a high correlation with that background and being curmudgeonly. Mainly because that means someone has been responsible for outcomes, regardless of feelings. And something often has to give, and it’s usually feelings. It’s also hard to not be cranky or even angry if someone has to constantly be the one ‘not having fun’ or cleaning up messes so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart.
There is huge market demand exactly for what you’re complaining about, which is faking things happening as convincingly as possible, precisely because being clear/concise, etc. helps with seeing the root cause of problems, and if someone is worried (or is legitimately) a root cause of the problem, of course they’ll consider that bad.
For example, a good sign of a badly led organization is that it’s always busy, but never seems to get anything done. Everything is an emergency, so nothing really gets fixed, etc.
Or there are constant meetings and emails, but nothing gets decided.
People will pay good money for the right kind of wallpaper that makes that ugly wall look pretty again.
> The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails.
Sure, and that's an actionable solution if you can control the actions of everyone else who emails you.
I don’t use it often either, but sometimes it is very useful. When I caught Covid last fall my wife incorrectly thought I had it three times. I was using a beta Google Gemini, and paying for it, and I asked “read my @gmail and tell me the date ranges when I have had Covid.”
That worked, but to be honest I have tried similar things more recently that didn’t work. Perhaps there is a routing model up front that decides whether or not to use a lot of compute for any given query?
Google also plans on charging more money for APIs for code completion plugins for IntelliJ IDs, etc. this year.
I would like to see AI pricing models be sustainable, not give things away for free, and have lots of control over when I use a lot of compute. I actually have this right now because I usually use LLM APIs and write my own agents for specific tasks.
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
> it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
I tend to agree, except these two things are kind of the same thing. It can make going through the noise easier by intelligently filtering out the noise or finding you the signal. Search. It doesn't necessarily need to eliminate the noise.
Maybe AI would be better if it prevented the noise, and its definitely going to add noise (expanding a few basic thoughts into an email with lots of fluff), but it can also solve it.
I also find that summarising content helps me digest it better. I have to fully understand the source in order to write the summary. The process of writing a summary is of immense value. Sometimes the summary itself is of minimal value.
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
I’m getting a lot of value out of NotebookLM drafting documents. If I’ve got a bunch of notes that need to be in a coherent design doc, it can give me a good enough first draft for me to edit into shape. Alternatively when I’ve got a design doc for something, but need to submit, say, a work request to another org, NotebookLM can take my doc and turn it into another format based on a doc template pretty nicely.
These outputs still require editing for sure, but each one can easily save me half the time to write these things.
I only use NotebookLM a couple times a month, but when I use it I get value from it. I wanted to put out a new edition of a book I wrote last year so I ingested the PDF for the previous version of my book and some notes on what I was thinking of adding. Then in Chat mode I asked for suggestions of interesting topics that I didn’t think of and a few other questions, then got a short summary that I used as a checklist for things that I might add.
I probably spent 20 minutes doing this and got value for my 20 minutes.
I feel quite the opposite.
I’m not a native english speaker, but working at US subsidiary I must produces reports in english etc - and having an LLM proofread my texts for me is great.
LLM:s are new modality to computing. If you need it, they are great. But just like excel/sheet have limited applications a LLM with data has limiited use as well.
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
> For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
I think this really encapsulates something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on in regards to LLM summarization. What it seems to indicate is that, if you need a computer to summarize a large amount of text that someone has sent to you, there are two likely possibilities:
1) The information is incredibly dense/important/technical/complex. This necessitates the extreme length of the message - (think: technical documents, research papers, a rough draft of a legal notice, or your will.) For these sorts of things, you should not rely on an LLM to summarize it, because it may miss key details of the message.
2) The person sending it to you is bad at communicating, in which case the solution is help them learn better communication, rather than "de-noising" their clumsy wording into something comprehensible.
"But what if its number 2, but it's coming from your boss?"
Then I see two obvious points to consider:
First, you should absolutely be telling them about the problem, regardless of the position that they hold. You can phrase it in a way that isn't rude. "Hey boss, I saw (message) but I'm not 100% the intent. I've actually noticed that with (other time)...I usually try to front-load the action items up front, and put the specifics lower down. Anyway, to make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about (action) on (thing), right?"
Second, until (or unless) their communication style is de-noised, then part of your job is being able to "translate" their instructions. Using an AI to do that for you is a bad idea because, at some point or another they're going to be trying to speak to you in-person, or by phone.
Not having dealt with their mannerisms in an unfiltered way might lead to you being "out of practice" and struggling much harder to figure out what they're trying to convey.
I saw a Google AI advert that said:
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
I guess the future is
1. Friend sends an apology email drafted by LLM.
2. Email gets summarized at the receiver end in the daily AI email "summary" which might be something like
You have a scheduled cake tasting this weekend. Did you know there's a bakery near your office that makes wedding cakes too. By the way your friend Joe can't make it to the wedding, do you want me to send a reply?
3. Reply email gets summarized by AI.
"Your friend acknowledges that you cannot rsvp. Do you want to schedule a wedding gift delivery on their wedding day ? XYZ neighborhood/online store has a sale next week".
4. Awkward situation ensues when you both meet at a location AI recommended to you both just after telling it to lie about your schedule.
You can skip the piles and piles of linguistic bullshit and wasted energy with a json API.
If you really care about this issue, I think we've brought it on ourselves.
Regarding teaching kids, we've set messaging templates for occasions that are at the center of our lives. We have Hallmark greeting cards to express feelings to people close to our hearts. If there's a template for expressing someone you're sorry their mother died, or happy they have a baby, I'm not sure throwing the stone at AI use is warranted.
In a way, I wonder if it will be the wake up call that will make simple and genuine communication acceptable again, without all the boilerplate we've built to feign care and emotions.
People always criticize Hallmark but it was never my understanding that the pre-written sentiment in those cards in any way obviated the need to write your own message. In fact, apart from generic Christmas cards you might get from insurers, and "thank you" cards from charities, I can't think of a time I've gotten such a card without a personal message written in it.
Are people really buying the "sorry for your loss" cards, just signing under the prewritten text, and sending them to someone?
There's a spectrum, including people who write almost nothing but choose really nice and non standard cards that properly convey they took time and effort find that specific one, and the people who use generic cards with 1500 words written on every free space they could find on the card.
My main gripe with cards with pre-written message is they deprive from the choice to write simple and obvious things. If your card already says "Happy Birthday" it will just be that much lazier for you to only write that on the dedicated space for a personal message.
In a way, a blank card with only these word would probably work better, and I feel people too often overlook that choice and go the Hallmark way instead because it feels like the default. Or plain bail out of the interaction because it just become a hurdle to them as they don't find anything else to say.
Can I recommend that you do the same to them except write your handwritten parts on the back of the card.
This is such a perfect analogy and I never put it together before.
I cannot stand those cards but to a greater extent receiving them. It really does feel worse than not getting anything. It's actually a slap in the face to me that someone would go out of their way to say nothing like this. It's proof that the relationship is fake.
I feel the same disgust when people throw inauthentic AI bullshit to me. How little do you have to care about someone to delegate a robot or a template to mediate your interactions because you can't be bothered?
Gemini's marketing is so bad. This isn't the first time they ran an ad that makes you wonder what's going on there. It really says a lot that an advertising company understands what makes for good advertising so poorly these days.
> A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
I’m not going to defend AI here because I seldom use it myself. But it should be noted that the way we learn has already undergone multiple different shifts due to changes in technology.
Search engine were a big one. No longer did we have to learn to memorise stuff nor learn how to research properly. Now we could just type a phrase into Google / whatever and get results. So people learned how to search rather than learning the facts itself.
> "A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking."
What about this:
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to...
Second law of thermodynamics says these models will all eventually collapse (due to overtraining on their own output) to yelling gibberish at us, and biology will continue to remain the only force in the universe capable of maintaining order despite increasing entropy. I think we'll be OK.
I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
It’s an anti competitive strategy, which in an ideal world would see them facing a crushing antitrust lawsuit from the FTC and DOJ. What they’re doing is forcing everyone to pay for their AI product. This makes it so that no other company can charge for their alternative AI products. After all, if your company’s spending goes up because of this Google price increase, your executives will not want to see double spending on AI products. So all those deserving smaller companies will miss out on these customers. Google is essentially using this forced price increase to kill their AI competitors by stealing their revenue, through illegal bundling. Just like Microsoft did with Teams to attack Slack illegally.
With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this likely won't happen.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
I'm sure this depends on where you live, but my Amazon shipments are late such a large portion of the time that they end up refunding most of the shipping costs I pay. It's like free prime for the patient!
Right now looking for an alternative for the same reason. Even if it cost me more on labor short term. They have been increasing prices regularly and I’m sure it will continue.
If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
Can I reject incoming emails, or am I screwed if I get a ton of spam?
We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.
Reminds me of an entertaining story about Microsoft Copilot last year, where companies were turning it off because it turned out it was TOO good at its job - if any accountant anywhere in the company had messed up their SharePoint permissions asking "what does everyone at this company earn?" would spit out all of the salaries: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/microsoft-copilot-data...
That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark it visible by all, and wait.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
You have to change the font colour of the trojan data to be the same as the background colour of the doc!
Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
It wouldn't need to be a permissions error on the file caused by the accountant, it could be an authorisation error on behalf of <whoever gives the LLM access to the various systems> providing too high a level of access (in their enthusiasm for the biggest possible set of training data).
This was just posed as a hypothetical, not something that actually happened. It would also require that the person asking about salary information already have access to said data.
Full quote: > "Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he explained.
Berkowitz said salary information, for example, might be picked up by a Copilot service.
"Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated," he told us. "But nobody has that. People have implemented these systems over time, particularly really big companies. And you get these conflicting authorizations or conflicting access to data."
I am surprised the Workspace extension isn’t controlled by the same setting that limits general workspace search results, where you can set things up so only documents you’ve seen or are linked to from documents you have explicit access to are returned in results: https://support.google.com/a/answer/12732365?hl=en
Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20/month.
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
My company is doing some similar crap. Half a year wasted on some bullshit AI thing that half the engineers were questioning from the start. Usage numbers are in the low 10%-20% range and are dropping despite massive push from marketing and onboarding teams.
The solution is to of course push even more AI stuff. The actual quote one of the C-level used was "Users don't understand the power of AI yet!" and I could barely hold in my laugh when I heard it.
I've been feeling like the world has lost their fucking minds with the AI push. I know that VC/investors play a big role in it, but I've never seen anything quite like it. The AI toothbrush [1] really took the cake for me for peak of absurdity, I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next...
[1] https://www.oralb.co.uk/en-gb/product-collections/genius-x
Same story at my employer last year and this year. Leadership very clearly stated their goal is to increase AI engagement. Solving actual user issues? Not mentioned once. At least the shareholders are happy, right?
When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users will have used it (they're effectively paying for it, they'll at least try once)
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
Shid. I made the mistake of getting my entire family onto my google apps 15+ years ago. Now I am paying for about 8 people every month and this will just make it worse.
It was selling well enough. It just was not getting enough traction. By bundling AI, they are giving exposure to everyone who didn’t want to use it or didn’t see the need for it. If they pulled it away in 2 years, and then lowered the price and charged separately for AI, I think more people would see it as necessary.
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
A little searching suggests you may have to contact support to get the toggles: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/318850451?hl=en&msgid...
I don't have a good way to verify that though.
I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty/data/?
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
What are you using it for? It has been completely subpar compared to any other LLM for me.
It's so bad at understanding your intentions.
I've been using it for setting up infra and projects on GCP and its been great. I use cursor for coding, but that isnt as helpful responding outside the IDE on cloud config. I have no GCP experience and I was able to get to a working application very quickly with Gemini. The GCP docs are outdated, often conflicting, but the Gemini experience was excellent.
Is Google One the same as just having extra storage for my Google Photos? I have that but just went onto Gemini and Advanced will cost me $33 pm.
Looking at https://one.google.com/about/plans it seems that the plans currently (in the US) are:
- "Standard 200 GB" ($30/year)
- "Premium 2 TB" ($100/year)
- "AI Premium 2 TB" (free first month + $20/month, so $220–$240/year)
- "Premium 5 TB" ($250/year)
and only the last two come with Gemini Advanced.
I tested Gemini today, asking it to extract key pieces of data from a large report (72 slide) PDF deck which includes various visualisations, and present it as structured data. It failed miserably. Two of the key stats that are the backbone of the report, it simply made up. When I queried it, it gave an explanation, which further compounded its error. When I queried that, extracted the specific slide, and provided it, it repeated the same error.
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
I used exactly the same prompt with each.
Maybe the prompt you used was more Claude-friendly than Gemini-friendly?
I'm only half-joking. Different models process their prompts differently, sometimes markedly so; vendors document this, but hardly anyone pays any attention to it - everyone seems to be writing prompts for an idealized model (or for whichever one they use the most), and then rate different LLMs on how well they respond.
Example: Anthropic documents both the huge impact of giving the LLM a role in its system prompt, and of structuring your prompt with XML tags. The latter is, AFAIK, Anthropic-specific. Using it improves response quality (I've tested this myself), and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that.
Maybe Gemini has some magic prompt features, too? I don't know, I'm in the EU, and Google hates us.
Possibly. But my Claude prompts work fine on ChatGPT, the only difference being ChatGPT isn't very good. I pay for both.
I would not pay for Gemini - which is presumably why they've added it for "free" for everyone.
My anthropic prompts in the API are structured. I've got one amazing API prompt that has 67 instructions, and gives mind-blowing results (to the point that it has replaced a human) but for a simple question I don't find value in that. And, frankly, 'consumer'-facing AI chatbots shouldn't need prompting expertise for basic out of the box stuff.
The prompt I used in this example was simply "Please extract the data points contained within this report and present as structured data"
> and yet as far I've seen, no BYOK tool offering multiple vendor support respects or leverages that
When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API? I use typingmind for quickly throwing things at my API keys for testing, and I'm pretty sure you can have a persistent custom system prompt, though I think you'd need to input it for each vendor/model.
> When you say BYOK tool do you mean effectively a GUI front end on the API?
Less that, and more focused tools like e.g. Aider (OSS Cursor from before Cursor was a thing).
I use TypingMind almost exclusively for any and all LLM chatting, and I do maintain a bunch of Claude-optimized prompts that specifically exploit the "XML tags" feature (some of them I also run through the Anthropic's prompt improver) -- but I don't expect the generic frontends to care about vendor-specific prompting tricks by default. Here, my only complaint is that I don't have control over how it injects attachments, and inlined text attachments in particular are something Anthropic docs recommend demarking with XML tags, which TypingMind almost certainly doesn't do. I'd also love for the UI to recognize XML tags in output and perhaps offer some structuring or folding on the UI side, e.g. to auto-collapse specified tags, such as "<thinking>" or "<therapeuticAnalysis>" or whatever I told the LLM to use.
(Oh, and another thing: Anthropic recently introduced a better form of PDF upload, in which the Anthropic side handles simultaneously OCR-ing and imaging the PDF and feeding it to the model, to exploit its multimodal capabilities. TypingMind, as far as I can tell, still can't take advantage of it, despite it boiling down to an explicit if/else on the model vendor.)
No, I first and foremost mean the more focused tools, that generalize across LLMs. Taking Aider as an example, as far as I can tell, it doesn't have any special handling for Anthropic, meaning it doesn't use XML tags to mark up the repo map structure, or demarcate file content or code snippets it says, or to let the LLM demarcate diffs in reply, etc. It does its own model-agnostic thing, which means that using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I lose out on model performance boost it's not taking advantage of.
I singled out Aider, but there's plenty of tools and plugins out there that utilize some common LLM portability libraries, and end up treating every LLM the same way. The LLM portability libraries however are not the place to solve it - by their nature, they target the lowest common denominator. Those specialized tools should be doing it IMO, and it's not even much work - it's a bunch of model-based if/elses. Might not look pretty, but it's not a maintenance burden.
I got a 1-year trial of Gemini Advanced with my Pixel 9 and I've had similar experiences. It makes up stuff far more often than any other models and it's just not very smart. I used the free version and thought the paid Advanced version would be better but I could hardly notice any difference, they both fail at the same prompts I've tried.
This is not to mention the poor app experience where some of the features are just missing or broken. For example it's able to "remember" stuff I ask it to remember, but when I ask it to forget something it says I have to manage it at this webpage (they didn't bother to implement this menu within the mobile app) that asks me to sign in again because it's opened in my web browser where I'm not signed into Google, and then it shows me an empty list and "Something went wrong". It's now calling me a name I told it as a joke and there's no way to make it forget
That matches with my experience, Claude is clearly ahead of its competitors in anything logic- or reasoning-based.
I find Gemini is better at queries that involve more kind of intuitive judgment over things where there isn't a clear "correct" answer. E.g. if I want a podcast recommendation, or advice on the best place to learn about a given problem, I find Gemini better than Claude.
Unfortunately for Gemini, 90% of the things I want an LLM for are better with stronger logic and reasoning.
There are so many bugs and sub-par implementations in workspace that Google could fix. My cynical guess is that the source code to workspace apps is probably a mystery to the current generation of 23 year olds who are tasked in maintaining them, so they change little.
100%
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
if people are worrying about importing their digital lives into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
I don't quite get these switches:
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
From the GP:
> Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
The only reason they have the "full" G Suite, is because there is no "just custom domain Gmail" offer available.
It's a pet peeve of mine when the only offering of some companies is just a single "full on premium" offer, and not some simple need. YouTube is an example of this for me, they have only an "everything included" subscription in YouTube Premium, but no other less expensive option, like "just no adverts please, I'm already happy with my alternative music and movie streaming subscriptions".
I only occasionally view YouTube vids (I tend to prefer text-based content). The adverts made me uninstall the YouTube app from my iPhone and similarly I will never watch YouTube on my AppleTV as it's just too unpleasant with the adverts and (as I said above) there is no reasonably priced offering when all I care is to have the adverts turned off.
When you sign up for a Google account, there's a label called "use your existing email", which will give you everything Google usually offers minus Gmail.
Without Gmail, I have yet to stumble upon a single use case which would require me to pay a subscription. I can use Docs, join Meets, use my phone, have a YouTube channel, click on "sign in with Google" buttons... no subscription to Google necessary. I notice no differences between my completely-free personal account and a Workspace work account.
I pay $5 a month to Fastmail to have a custom domain in my email, best of both worlds for a third of the price!
I simply don't use other Google features or in limited capacity. I have Office 365 desktop installation. I set up a NAS as a Drive replacement (that was a bit costly, but no regrets and it actually works across all my computers where Drive would randomly crash, files would disappear etc.) with automatic backups to cloud and every now and then I archive data to external hard drives.
I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
This spurred me to go back and read the predictions:
>But I can tell you this: Google has changed my life. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google in 3 tries, looking no further than the first 10 search results on each try, then it probably doesn't exist.
What a sad future we're in.
I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
I guess this is why it is being bundled, Google can keep working on it with someone else's money, so their profits aren't hit. It's telling that the increase is regardless you use Gemini or not.
FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you'll need to go here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/47208553126 and here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/793154499678.
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas, but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI tooling as software developers and scientists?
I dont see it like that.
Its more like:
If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool interoperable with my chosen AI.
If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont force it in anyway.
> There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in there.
This is the camp I'm in. I've given AI the "college try", I've tried using in my workflows, and I've found that there are some cases where it genuinely has helped. But there is far too much drivel and hype.
I want to hear more from the people who've embraced it for a year, found it's pitfalls and perks, and reflect on it. I'm tired of the treadmill of content from someone who signed up for OpenAI on a Monday, used it for a JIRA ticket on Tuesday, then rushed to belt out a blogpost about how their career is forever changed on Wednesday.
Here are a list of AI use cases that I guess are "garbage" to you.
Detecting diseases. Creating drugs to cure or help with disease. Aiding astronomy. Understanding the genome. Scanning documents into text (OCR). Translation. Voice recognition. Detecting fraud. Spam filtering.
Are you willing to give up all of these? Given your attitude you probably should.
All of those are incredibly vague. I'm no astronomer, but I'd hazard a guess that it's "solving astronomy" about as well as it's "solving programming" or "solving mathematics". (That is, it isn't. Outside of a few grifters' imaginations, anyway.)
But sure, let's talk about a few of the more egregious ones.
> Scanning documents into text (OCR).
Useless for old texts, since you still need to review the transcriptions (and the "smarter" the transcription engine is, the harder review becomes since the errors look more plausible).
Useless for new texts, just type them in a readable format instead.
> Translation.
Heh.
> Voice recognition.
Useless. Do you really want more IVR menus?
> Detecting fraud.
Illegal unless you can explain your reasoning (tip: you can't, or you wouldn't be using "AI" in the first place).
There are two aspects you should consider: 1) Google's AI isn't as good. 2) people don't want an AI middleman for person-to-person communication.
People may dislike AI written code or AI "art", but using AI to talk to other people is just seen as dishonest. It's even worse when it's not all that good.
They kinda already do it with YT Premium/YT Music. I don't have anything against YT Music, it's a perfectly fine music service from the amount I've used it. But I already have a Spotify with my preferred playlists, and I don't really have incentive to swap it over aside from maybe saving a handful of dollars a month.
Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless of if you actually plan to use it or not.
Isn't that always the case with bundles and suites? Google Workspace has always been a bundle of products, and few actually used every product in the bundle.
Yes, google workspace has never been worth it. The difference is that people can easily understand the value of the products they aren't using.
They have managed to vendor lock me. The price just keeps going up and I can't get out.
The beauty of having a monopoly or oligopoly in a dozen major markets is that you don't have to care about customers. As much as I hate this move and don't think it will help the company, I think Google is powerful and entrenched enough that it will make out just fine. Their users will bear most of the costs.
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
The legacy free edition includes the features of the 'Business Starter' plan, the most affordable option. In this table [1], you can find the features available for each plan.
Here are the details for the Business Starter plan specifically:
Gmail: Help me write, Side panel, Contextual smart replies (Coming soon).
Gemini app: Enterprise-grade security & privacy, Google Workspace extensions.
NotebookLM: Upload sources, create summaries and Audio Overviews, and Q&A.
I'm also milking Google with this.
I am aware that some of this is coming to the Business Starter plan, but where do you see that the legacy free edition always gets the features which the Business Starter plan gets? And do you know the answer to the question of which Terms of Service will apply to legacy free edition Gemini features?
Interesting that the Business Starter plan isn't getting Gemini Advanced according to that table. That omission isn't clear at all from their Google Workspace blog post about the announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/empo...
Yes, you’re right—there doesn’t seem to be any statement explicitly saying that the legacy free edition will always have the same features as the Business Starter plan, at least not that I could find.
However, I noticed that on my legacy free edition, new features were integrated around the same time they were shipped to the Business Starter plan. For example, when the Gemini app was launched for Workspace, it was added to my panel: https://imgur.com/a/QvROTiD
Interestingly, when I went to the admin panel to take the screenshot, I saw a banner with the OP announcement: https://imgur.com/a/CDgdrlB. It does say "en todas las ediciones de Workspace" (in all Workspace editions), but maybe not the one I currently have, haha (legacy free edition).
Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for existing users. You're right that they initially planned to get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by which existing users had to confirm that they were using it for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to have the legacy free edition.
Stuck on GSuite Legacy (with my own domain) and Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage. Workspace too expensive for family purposes.
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
> Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
Huh. Which edition are you on, the no-cost business starter they migrated some users to or the GSuit legacy free? How long did your account stay at 97% space? From my experience, it takes a week to trigger.
I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a second user in my workspace who also benefits from this feature.
Since the whole thing is not documented anywhere, it's hard to rely on or exploit. From my experience, it works.
Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it. It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
There are also single reports on Google taking back the extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."