Google recently introduced the “Help me write” feature in Docs as part of its Duet AI for Google Workspace initiative. This new tool aims to enhance productivity and workflow by providing assistance with writing tasks (not replacing creativity or originality!). Many users who gain access by applying to the Workspace Labs queue are already using it to improve their writing experience. Today, I’m going to show you how to use it and give you some tips and tricks for getting the most out of it once you get to use it for yourself!
Help me write appears as soon as you open a new Google Doc if you’re part of the beta labs. When you click the button in the text of the document, you’ll notice an animated writing area that constantly cycles through suggestions on what the AI can help you with. These suggestions are varied and cover a wide range of writing tasks, such as drafting blog posts, writing song lyrics, annotating social media posts, creating formal letters, resumes, and cover letters, among others. However, you are free to write whatever you want here, so don’t be fooled!
To get started, simply type your request or claim in the text box provided and click Create. For example, let’s say you wanted to write a comment on a social media post about Chromebooks. The AI will then generate a comment with relevant hashtags. If you are satisfied with the generated text, you can click the blue Insert button to seamlessly add it to your document. However, if you want to edit the text, you can click on the area where you originally wrote, add more specific details, and press enter again to recreate your text response.
Then, you can click the Refine button to ask Docs to “formalize”, “shorten”, “detail” or “reformat” the text. Again, this is more rudimentary and specific than the freedom you’d have with ChatGPT, but it’s also more likely to be useful and easier to understand for casual users because of it. Clicking these options will, of course, do just these things – it will either formalize the text to make it look more appropriate or professional, shorten it to make sure it can fit in smaller spaces like a Twitter post, and then sharpen it to add detail and flesh out a little more, or completely reworked. The last option looks a lot like the “rebuild” button, but I’m still playing with it at this point to be sure.
Here’s a pro tip – once your text is “inserted” and accepted, it will be placed in a Google Doc for further editing. However, you may notice that the pencil icon is still located to the left of the document wherever the cursor is placed. You can either insert more productive AI text among what you’ve already written or created, or highlight and edit existing text using the same Help Me Write feature! Doing so will ensure that you get the most fun and best use of the new feature.
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I notice that it doesn’t seem to have context about everything else already inserted in the document, so if you highlight existing text and tell it to do something, you may need to reselect the subject – bummer.
Finally, the strongest built-in feature in setting up the new Docs checksums is the “Custom” entry section. When you highlight text and click the magic pencil icon to the left of the document panel, you’ll see a text entry box in the pop-up called “Custom.” Here, you can type in very specific commands to the AI like “seem more confident”, or really anything else you want it to do to change the existing text.
For example, if you do this and type “Focus more on battery life and more comfortable sound”, it will take those comments and re-create the text for further notice. The possibilities are endless. The Help Me Write feature in Docs is still new, but it looks really promising. I’d like to have this integrated into Google Keep at some pointand I can see that this is really helpful for a lot of people!
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