Google Cloud Introduces New Generative AI Capabilities, Showcases Customers Putting Generative AI to Work

By Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud

Today at Google I/O, we are excited to share the next steps in our artificial intelligence (AI) journey, and those of our customers and partners as well. A number of organizations are already starting to use our generative AI offerings to move their ideas from experimentation to enterprise-ready applications.

Wendy’s FreshAI, for example, is designed to revolutionize the quick service restaurant industry. This technology is transforming Wendy’s drive-thru food ordering experience with Google Cloud’s generative AI and large language models (LLMs)—with the ability to discern the billions of possible order combinations on the Wendy’s menu. In June, Wendy’s plans to launch its first pilot of the technology in a Columbus, Ohio-area restaurant, before expanding to more drive-thru locations.

Our open ecosystem, which provides opportunities for every kind of partner, continues to grow. We’ve announced new or expanded partnerships with SaaS companies like Box, Dialpad, Salesforce, and UKG; and consultancies including Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG. Together with our previous announcements with companies like Anthropic, Cohere, Midjourney, Replit, and more, they provide a wide range of options for businesses and governments looking to bring generative AI into their organizations. 

Introducing new generative AI capabilities for Google Cloud

To help cloud users of all skill levels solve their everyday work challenges, we’re excited to announce Duet AI for Google Cloud, a new generative AI-powered collaborator. Duet AI for Google Cloud serves as your expert pair programmer and assists cloud users with contextual code completion, offering suggestions tuned to your code base, generating entire functions in real-time, and assisting you with code reviews and inspections. It can fundamentally transform the way cloud users of all skill sets build new experiences and is embedded across Google Cloud interfaces—within the integrated development environment (IDE), Google Cloud Console, and even chat.

For developers looking to create generative AI applications more simply and efficiently, we are also introducing new foundation models and capabilities across our Google Cloud AI products. And to continue to enable and inspire more customers and partners, we are opening up Generative AI support in Vertex AI and expanding access to many of these new innovations to more organizations.

Three new foundation models are now available in Vertex AI. Codey, our code generation foundation model, helps accelerate software development with code generation, code completion, and code chat. Imagen, our text-to-image foundation model, lets customers generate and customize studio-grade images. And Chirp, our state-of-the-art speech model, allows customers to more deeply engage with their customers and constituents inclusively in their native languages with captioning and voice assistance. They can each be accessed via application programming interfaces (APIs), tuned through our intuitive Generative AI Studio, and feature enterprise-grade security and reliability, including encryption, access control, content moderation, and recitation capabilities that let organizations see the sources behind model outputs.

Underpinning these innovations is our AI-optimized infrastructure. We provide the widest choice of compute options among leading cloud providers and are excited to continue to build them out with the introduction of new A3 Virtual Machines based on NVIDIA’s H100 graphics processing unit (GPU). These VMs, alongside the recently announced G2 VMs, offer a comprehensive range of GPU power for training and serving AI models.

Extending generative AI across Google Workspace

Earlier this year, we shared our vision for bringing generative AI to Google Workspace, and gave many users early access to features that helped them write in Gmail and Google Docs. Today, we are excited to announce Duet AI for Google Workspace, which brings together our powerful generative AI features and lets users collaborate with AI so they can get more done every day. We’re delivering the following features to trusted testers via Workspace Labs: 

• In Gmail, we’re adding the ability to draft responses that consider the context of your existing email thread—and making the experience available on mobile.

• In Google Slides and Google Meet, we’re enabling you to easily generate images from text descriptions. Custom images in slides can help bring your story to life, and in Meet they can be used to create custom backgrounds.

• In Google Sheets, we’re automating data classification and the creation of custom plans—helping you analyze and organize data faster than ever.

Moving the industry forward, responsibly

Customers continue to amaze us with their ideas and creativity, and we look forward to continuing to help them discover their own paths forward with generative AI. While the potential for impact on business is great, we remain committed to taking a responsible approach, guided by our AI Principles. As we gather more feedback from our customers and users, we will continue to bring new innovations to market, with a goal to enable organizations of every size and industry to increase efficiency, connect with customers in new ways, and unlock entirely new revenue streams.

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About Google Cloud

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology – all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.