What do Search, artificial intelligence (AI) and productivity all have in common? They’ve all found a comfortable home in Google’s new search product, Springboard.
For over a decade, Google has been selling its search solutions to businesses. Now it is parlaying that expertise into Google Springboard, a platform designed to help Google Cloud users search data across their entire suite of Google productivity tools.
This means that across all Google Apps—Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Sites and more—users can quickly find desired information.
Drivers for Springboard
Given the exploding volume of data being produced by organizations today, searching for assets and internal information has become a surprisingly sluggish process.
According to Google’s VP of Engineering for Google Apps in TechCrunch, “The average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.” Springboard aims to mitigate this inefficiency by providing a smart, proactive, centralized platform for users to search within. While currently only available to a small group of customers, it is slated for wider release in the future.
Proactive Intelligence
Google Springboard offers file suggestions influenced by a user’s recent projects, and through artificial intelligence to guess files they might find valuable at a given time. It will work across computers and phones, the same way the G Suite suite does.
Google recently announced that it added more intelligence to Google Sites as well. Google’s progress in the arena of machine learning (ML) afforded it the ability to make Sites more proactively intelligent, allowing it to respond to user-generated design updates. For example, if a user makes a background lighter, Sites will make the accompanying text darker.
While Sites originally appeared to be developed with power users in mind, the updates to Sites are geared to make it more user-friendly for standard line of business users who just want to get a site built quickly. As such, it will now deliver drag-and-drop editing capabilities and real-time collaboration.