3 hours ago
3
It's gotten pretty easy to use tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini to generate reams of text, but it often requires rounds of refining prompts to get the output you want. Now you can voice your disorganized thoughts within Google Docs and a new AI feature will fuse them into readable text, though only higher-tier Google AI subscribers will be able to use it when it arrives this summer.
At Google I/O 2026, the company unveiled a new feature -- Docs Live -- that turns spoken ramblings into organized text. The kicker is, if you grant it permission, it will rifle through your connected Google accounts (Gmail, Drive and Chat) as well as pore over the web to refine the output. At last week's Android I/O Edition event, we saw a similar feature, called Rambler, added to the Gboard keyboard that lets you dictate text messages while intelligently omitting verbal stumbles and mid-thought changes.
Google is positioning Docs Live as a combination dictation secretary and editor, and there are likely plenty of people who'd be relieved to have AI translate their thoughts into cohesive, compelling text. As someone who has built a career around that difficult transmutation, I understand the appeal of avoiding the struggle, but writing is a skill that takes effort and repetition to develop. Docs Live may do the work for people, but outsourcing that labor won't make them better writers.
That's assuming Docs Live works as advertised, transforming spoken thoughts into outlined and written text, something we'll have to test ourselves. As with other AI tasks, I'm curious how long the revision and reformatting of something Docs Live outputs will take and whether it'll be quicker to simply write something the old-fashioned way. (To be clear, we do not use generative AI to write content. See CNET's AI Policy.)
Docs Live might quickly spit out more unrefined text, though. In a pre-brief ahead of Google I/O, I saw a recorded video demonstrating a scenario in which a nameless Google employee described using the feature to sketch out a speech to deliver at their former high school's career day. In the spoken stream of consciousness, the employee worked through steps to get Docs Live to ingest their resume and come up with "some funny analogies," so it would be more engaging to students. After reading the output text, they asked the AI tool to reformat the generated analogies into a table to make them easier to read and generate a story about how their brother inspired them to become a software engineer. It took about a minute for Docs Live to generate a speech based on those parameters and revisions.
As previously mentioned, Docs Live will only be available to Google AI subscribers, specifically those with the AI Pro ($20 per month) or Ultra ($100 or $200 per month) tiers. Other services in the Google software ecosystem are getting voice-controlled features, too, such as inbox searching in Gmail Live and automatic note-taking and organizing in Keep.
