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Google Assistant now able to manage your calendar

Paula Gilbert
By Paula Gilbert, ITWeb telecoms editor.
San Francisco, 11 Apr 2019
The Google Cloud Next 2019 conference is taking place in San Francisco.
The Google Cloud Next 2019 conference is taking place in San Francisco.

Google Assistant can now finally manage your calendar. This and other new G Suite updates were announced by Amy Lokey, VP of user experience for G Suite, speaking at the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference, in San Francisco.

G Suite is Google's suite of collaborative productivity apps such as Gmail, Calendar and Drive, but also offers a number of business-grade services not included with Google's free consumer apps.

Lokey demonstrated how Google's G Suite is integrating with Google Assistant, specifically with calendar. She showed how users will now be able to ask the Assistant to tell them when and where their next meeting is and even e-mail participants of the meeting with updates using voice commands on Google Assistant.

This integration is available in beta and is available on mobile and Google Home devices. However, an event cannot yet be created through the Assistant, although this feature should be available in future.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told the conference that Gmail, which launched 15 years ago, is today used by over 1.5 billion people every day.

Lokey added that over five million businesses are using G Suite, including digital innovators like Netflix, Spotify and Lyft, which built their companies using G Suite and continue to scale using it. Lokey said over 90 million students and educators are also using G Suite applications.

Getting into Voice

Lokey announced a number of updates to Google's set of intelligent productivity and collaboration apps, including a new Voice offering.

"Voice is a cloud telephony service that gives you a phone number that works from anywhere, on any device. With Google's AI built in, Voice can help you transcribe voicemails and block spam calls," the company said.

Voice also uses text-to-speech technology to automatically create call menus in up to nine languages. Voice is easy for admins to provision and manage, since it takes care of number assignment, porting and billing.

Chat moves into Gmail

Another announcement was the evolution of the classic Google Hangouts to focus on two uses for enterprise users: Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet.

"We've seen great adoption with both tools among G Suite customers, and today we're bringing Hangouts Chat into Gmail."

This means all team communications can easily be accessed in one place on users' desktops.

For G Suite enterprise customers, the company announced it is bringing third-party connectivity in Cloud Search. Two years ago, Google introduced Cloud Search to help employees search every digital asset and person in their company.

Last year, Google started offering Cloud Search as a standalone solution, and now as a part of the standalone offering, Google has made it possible for businesses to search third-party data sources, like SAP and Salesforce.

Other G Suite announcements included additions to Hangouts Meet, connected sheets with BigQuery, Office editing in Docs, Sheets and Slides, and some new security updates.

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