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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

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Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#31
post #25

Not bad, so instead of having people spend time making powerpoints and then give presentations while everyone else pretends to listen, now the presenter can auto generate it while everyone else pretends to have clicked the link. This is a more efficient way to waste time, it might actually succeed in many companies (until Google kills it anyway).

See, then there's a future market in having your personal AI watch the video for you and send you a two-sentence summary.

It's like the opposite of compression. Expand a piece of data 10-fold for transmission, then recompress it back down at the other side.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#32
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline" This is why I have a strong “no recordings” rule for any meeting that benefits from back-and-forth conversation. Especially if it’s a knowledge sharing opportunity like an internal tech talk, brown bag discussion, or similar. Nothing sucks more than presenting a talk to 3 blank squares, getting no questions, an…

You can treat it as recording a YouTube video

I prefer to treat it like a small club standup session. These meetings are how you figure out what to put in the youtube video or other documentation. Audience questions are vital.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#34
> For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever.

When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the point of meetings though. Meetings are for Aligning Stakeholders or Collaborating Across Teams at least in my world. Do you regularly attend meetings to be an audience member?

At various places of employment, /some/ meetings have absolutely been just so. Nothing of day-to-day value was ever communicated in those meetings, and nothing of value was lost when I stopped attending them. Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful

It’s not always that there’s no value in what’s communicated; often it’s just that there’s not much value in attending live.

Teams’ auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-summarization, is great for consuming these presentations after the fact in a fraction of the time.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#36
post #12
post #4

My prediction on this: people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline", people will get crunched and not watch the videos before finally re-scheduling meetings where the authors will step-by-step in the videos and present the content as we used to do with slides.

This is not the point of meetings though. Meetings are for Aligning Stakeholders or Collaborating Across Teams at least in my world. Do you regularly attend meetings to be an audience member?

Most companies I've worked at have had some form of that, yes.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#37

There is an associated problem we've seen in screencasting For every minute of screentime, there is time requirement for writing, practicing, filming, editing, fixing bad takes, etc. While I can whip up a presentation quickly, videos take quite a bit more. The pros make it look easy, but it isn't

I feel the opposite though for lots of internal communication. I often see so much time that (to me) feels wasted when employees do tons of "polish" for slide decks for internal teams. Like you're just communicating to other employees, the goal is just to get the information across, not make it a work of art. With a video I can quickly just say what needs to be communicated, but then with some highlighted bullets (wh…

All communications should be ideally polished. That’s you taking the time to refine your ideas and package it so those who listen to you can focus on the message and story you want to tell them, and not be distracted by irrelevant details, guesses, or just sloppy work.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#38
I've always been skeptical of generative AI being used to make slides. I like the idea of it, and maybe someday we will get there. But right now, they all feel like they are trying to fully automate the process where what I really want them to do is automate the tedious parts, co-piloting with me.

Because what ends up happening is I need a high degree of precision and I have a very concrete idea of what I need to present on a slide and exactly how to do it. But because it's fully automated, I have to instead convince the AI to generate my concrete idea on its own. Then I just don't use it entirely. Meanwhile, I go back to tediously making little shapes and moving them into precise locations, aligning things, and so on.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#39
I am sooo interested in this because I think loom is one of the best and most useful products for communicating knowledge. Especially in remote companies.

But it’s not interactive!

I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked.

I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not enough IMO. The future is: everybody has tablet they can draw with (like the ipad pro) and can easily communicate back and forth by cobuilding an interactive timeline of videos. I see the vision.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#40

> For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail

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