Google Reveals Springboard, An AI Assistant For Enterprise Users

Google has announced a new digital assistant targeted at enterprise users that can search through information in Google Apps like Gmail, Drive, and Calendar, and provide help to users throughout the day.

Called Springboard, the digital assistant has been likened to Google Now but for business users, and uses Google’s artificial intelligence to glean convenient and relevant information for business customers of Google’s productivity suite.

“Google Springboard helps you find the right information that you need at the moment that you need it,” wrote Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of engineering at Google Apps, in a blog post.

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“It searches quickly and easily across all of your information in Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Contacts and more. Springboard also assists you throughout your workday by proactively providing useful and actionable information and recommendations,” he added.

More information is scarce, but the announcement comes in the same week Apple revealed its own digital assistant, Siri, will be coming to desktop users in macOS Sierra, Apple’s new operating system.

“As we continue to invest in applying technologies like machine intelligence to power our web search engine, we’re working on a new way to bring all of this power to the enterprise,” wrote Raghavan.

Google Springboard has already been trialled with a small set of early adopters, said Google, and admins of companies that use Google Apps for Work can sign up for testing here.

Along with Springboard, Google also announced tweaks to Google Sites. Google is bringing Google Sites customers a new drag-and-drop feature for real-time collaboration, and new themes and layouts made to scale for any screen size.

“We have a lot more in store for both Google Springboard and Google Sites, and we’re excited to help you start to take back the time you spend searching for and gathering information,” wrote Raghavan.

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