Google Docs just got an interesting new rival

By Judy Sanhz Published August 6, 2024

Zoom meeting with Zoom Docs being used. — Zoom

In a posting on its official blog yesterday, Zoom officially launched its first word processor tool, Zoom Docs. This tool aims to enhance meeting effectiveness thanks to the AI Companion and is available in the video conferencing app.

Zoom Docs is now available for free and paid subscribers at no additional cost. Free users are limited to 10 shared docs and unlimited personal docs without an AI companion. All paid Zoom Workplace plans with version 6.1.6 or later have no limit to the number of shared docs and have access to AI Companion.

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You can add colleagues through mentions with the option to add comments for additional feedback. Additionally, users can add content such as images, tables, and bullet blocks when creating their docs.

“Zoom Docs is our first Zoom Workplace product with generative AI built in from the ground up; it effortlessly transforms information from Zoom Meetings into actionable documents and knowledge bases, so teams can stay focused on meaningful work,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Zoom Docs is included at no additional cost with Zoom Workplace paid licenses, creating even more value for our customers. With AI Companion available every step of the way, Zoom Docs is purpose-built to empower people to ‘work happy’ and give them more time back in their day.”

Zoom Docs will create meeting summaries with meeting documents and claims to make co-editing easier. The AI Companion can make text longer or shorter, among other options. Zoom also contends that revision and content generation are easier on business documents. Zoom AI Companion can also alter the tone of a document to make it suitable for a specific audience, and users can also create meetings via Zoom Docs.

Zoom Docs can also catch grammatical errors and instantly translate text into nine languages. One crucial fact to keep in mind is that AI Companion, including AI Companion capabilities in Zoom Docs, can be restricted by region.

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Computing Writer

Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.

Computing

ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome

A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools -- and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

Computing

This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.

Computing

Perplexity’s two new features take it beyond just a chatbot

An abstract image showing floating squares used for a Perplexity blog post.

Perplexity AI, makers of the popular chatbot by the same name, announced Thursday that it is rolling out a pair of new features that promise to give users more flexibility over the sorts of sources they employ: Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces.

"Today, we're launching Perplexity for Internal Search: one tool to search over both the web and your team's files with multi-step reasoning and code execution," Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Previously, users were able to upload personal files for the AI to chew through and respond upon, the same way they could with Gemini, ChatGPT, or Copilot. With Internal Search, Perplexity will now dig through both those personal documents and the internet to infer its response.