Google Gemini launches "Canvas" and audio overview to enhance collaboration experience

Google recently launched a new feature called "Canvas" for its AI-based chatbot Gemini, aiming to enhance users' creative and collaborative experience. This feature, similar to the tools of the same name in OpenAI’s ChatGPT Canvas and Anthropic’s Artifacts, provides Gemini users with an interactive space for them to create, improve and share writing and programming projects.

"Canvas is designed to work seamlessly with Gemini. These new features will make Gemini a more efficient collaborative partner, helping users turn their ideas into reality," Dave Citron, Product Director at Gemini, said in a blog post. With this new tool, users can easily draft long information, edit and fine-tune it in Gemini's web or mobile app.

Canvas allows users to update specific parts of a draft with dedicated tools, where users can simply highlight a paragraph and ask Gemini to simplify, specialize, or adjust it to a more informal style. For example, if a user wants to add professional color to his content, he can collaborate with others by exporting it to Google Docs with just one click.

In addition to text processing functions, Gemini's Canvas also has programming-related tools, where users can generate and preview Web application prototypes such as HTML and React code. Canvas refreshes the preview in real time when the user requests a change. For example, a user can ask Gemini to generate HTML for an email subscription form and preview its display on a web page.

In addition, Google also introduced NotebookLM's audio overview feature in this update. This feature can generate audio summary from documents, web pages and other sources, presented in podcast form. Users only need to upload documents through the prompt bar to quickly generate audio summary, which is convenient for downloading or sharing at any time. Since Tuesday, Canvas and Audio Overview features have been available for free to Gemini users around the world, but Canvas' code preview feature is currently available on the web version only, while audio overview summary is limited to the English version.

Google's Canvas and audio overview functions launched this time not only improves Gemini's collaboration capabilities, but also provides users with more convenient creative tools.