Google announced at its I/O developer conference that it is bringing voice-based prompting features to Workspace apps including Docs, Keep, and Gmail. The features allow users to create drafts, take notes, and search for emails by speaking to the company's AI assistant.

In Docs, users can create a draft document using their voice. During a demo, Google showed that a user can fetch résumé details from Drive, add event logistics from an email into a document, and include humorous anecdotes. The voice-based prompting feature also understands when users change their mind and ask for a detail to be revised within the same conversation turn.

"In the future, users will be able to create and edit documents using their voice," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. Previously, users had to manually type document content in short sentences and make multiple follow-up edits, which required more separate interactions.

In Keep, Google is adding a feature that allows users to dictate their thoughts by voice, with AI turning the transcription into a structured note or a list. In Gmail, voice-based functionality lets users converse with Gemini and ask for details such as their next flight, their Airbnb booking code, or the time of a physician appointment.

Earlier this month, Google released its dictation product Rambler, which is built into Gboard and works across apps. Notetaking apps such as Voicenotes and AudioPen added voice-based transcription-to-note features a few years ago, and dictation apps including Wispr Flow, Monologue, and Aqua have built voice-based typing functionality into their products.

Tech companies are incorporating AI into their products and features, leading users to ask lengthier queries. Voice input can allow users to express long sentences and complex multistep requests more easily, and current generation AI models can understand mid-sentence changes in user requests and output the final query accordingly. Google is adding more voice-based features across its apps in response to this trend.