In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, Google continues to push the boundaries with its latest innovation, Duet.AI. Positioned as a GenAItool, Duet.AI provides conversational assistance and code completion, significantly enhancing productivity for developers and cloud users. Let’s explore its features, advantages, and potential applications.
Pros
- Conversational Assistance: Duet.AI introduces a natural language chat interface, allowing users to seek guidance on cloud-related questions and best practices. This feature is available across various environments, including Google Cloud Console and popular integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IntelliJ.
- AI-Powered Code Assistance: Developers can leverage Duet.AI to streamline coding processes. Whether writing applications, calling APIs, or querying data, the tool assists in completing code, generating code blocks based on comments, and supporting 20+ programming languages, including Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and SQL.
- Intellectual Property: Google emphasizes the protection of user data and intellectual property. Duet.AI assures users that their code, inputs, and recommendations will not be utilized for product and model learning and development. Additionally, the tool provides source citations to comply with license requirements.
- Fully Managed Service: Duet.AI is a fully managed service, regularly updated and monitored by Google. Users don’t need to delve into the intricacies of machine learning and AI, as the tool is built upon the Vertex AI platform, ensuring optimal performance and scalability.
- Safe and Responsible AI: Google adheres to a set of AI principles, emphasizing responsible AI development. Duet.AI in Google Cloud has obtained ISO/IEC certifications in information security management, cloud security, protection of personally identifiable information (PII), and privacy information management.
Cons
- Learning Curve: Initially, users may encounter a learning curve while engaging with Duet.AI, particularly when navigating its conversational assistance and code completion features. However, familiarity with cloud environments and development tools can mitigate this challenge.
- Data Privacy Concerns: Similar to other AI tools, concerns about data privacy exist. While Duet.AI asserts that user data is not used for training models, a more detailed privacy policy would be beneficial to address potential apprehensions.
- Price Point: Duet.AI costs $30/user/month in addition to the regular Google Workspace business subscription. Duet.AI may not be worth it for firms with limited operational budgets, especially given that AI capabilities are still nascent.
Use Cases: Duet.AI in Business
- Assisted Development: Developers can expedite the application development by utilizing Duet.AI for code suggestions, solving code challenges, and receiving expert guidance within their preferred IDEs.
- Operational Efficiency: Operations teams can benefit from Duet.AI’s assistance in operating infrastructure and applications more effectively, such as Google Sheets, Google Slide, and Google Docs. It provides quick access to curated answers, expert insights, and troubleshooting assistance.
- Data Analysis: Duet.AI aids in accelerating data analysis by offering contextual SQL completions, enabling users to generate and iterate queries with natural language quickly. Visualization of data insights is also streamlined through integration with tools like Looker.
- Database Management: Simplifying data management tasks, Duet.AI in Cloud Spanner provides code suggestions for structuring, modifying, and querying data. The tool also assists in migrating databases, contributing to a more efficient development journey.
- Security Analysis: Integrated into security products, Duet.AI assists in security analysis and remediation. It can quickly summarize and classify threat information, perform complex searches, and recommend actions for issue resolution.
- Interoperability: Developers can create APIs and integrations using Duet.AI’s natural language prompts, automatically generating API specifications, integration flows, and plugin extensions while adhering to enterprise standards.
Capria’s Take
At Capria, we use Google Workspace as our core file management system, so we were naturally interested in evaluating DuetAI’s capabilities. For now, we concluded that the price point of an additional $30/month (comparable to Microsoft’s AI add-on price) was not worth the nascent functionalities available for Google users. For example, DuetAI’s Google Docs feature only allows you to prompt an AI chatbot to create new content but not prompt it to edit or revise pre-existing content in a given document.
There are some promising capabilities that Google has reported they’ll release soon, such as Google Meet live and automated AI summaries, that we’ll be waiting on to re-evaluate whether we will purchase this for our team.
Conclusion
Duet.AI by Google represents a significant stride in AI-driven productivity enhancement. Its capabilities in conversational assistance, code completion, and diverse applications across business domains underscore its potential impact. While there are considerations such as a learning curve and data privacy concerns, the tool’s commitment to respecting intellectual property and Google’s stringent safety measures make it a compelling choice for businesses aiming to leverage AI for increased efficiency and innovation. As Duet.AI continues to evolve, addressing existing limitations while introducing innovative features, it is poised to become an integral part of Capria’s developer toolkit and business operations.
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