google launched a productivity application back in 2021 and i completely missed it today we're
going to overview what google stack is and what it means for the google drive system and a little
bit more about it if you're somebody that's curious about whether it could be useful for
your own productivity now welcome folks my name is francesco and welcome to the keep productive
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we can find us below in description too now google obviously work on a lot of different projects and
one of the departments that they have as a spin-off department is called area120
and it's basically an in-house incubator where google staff can sort of experiment with ideas
and bring stuff to life more recently one of the projects google tables has sort of progressed
into a more sort of real-life phase and um is sort of being weaved more into the system
of google drive and uh for those who don't know we've done a video on google tables but basically
it's like an airtable type competitor application which aims to sort of bridge the gap between
sort of collaborative documents and um the sort of traditional google documents um in a bit of a sort
of different fashion which is quite interesting but this project was actually an idea that matthew
cohen and christopher padangrill i'm sorry if i got that name wrong they decided to sort of
spin this off into a project stack and um it's really interesting because christopher came from
the education startup socratic and they were acquired by google a couple of years ago
i think in 2018 this socratic idea is basically like a a way to scan algebra algorithms or math
questions quadratic formulas and things like that tough stuff in a range of subjects like
biology chemistry etc and it will basically help you answer them by breaking down the
steps to solving them so they were using a bit of like artificial intelligence to
help bring that together so um they're basically taking their experience and knowledge into stack
now let's get to what stack actually is right now it's in a only available in the us and it's an
android application it's already been downloaded a hundred thousand plus times and essentially it's
just a way to get rid of paper in allowing you to scram pdfs documents and stuff and upload them to
google drive now you're probably wondering okay there are apps like this out there that sort of
do the job well google was saying that some of the artificial intelligence that they're bringing in
goes beyond the technologies of what's already out there now i use a receipt scanner document
scanner that is called dext it's one that our accountant set us up with and to be honest it
works pretty well it allows me to just scan it on my phone and then basically upload the document
and it automatically determines some of the you know the transaction amount and where
it's from just from being able to upload that document well apparently snack goes
a little bit further because what it does is it scans the document and it can detect
the name of the actual store from their logo and also be able to detect you know the amount and the
date and things like that but what it does is it categorizes it for you into things like receipts
bills ids even you know invoices and stuff like that and vehicles so it basically tries to
automate that sort of you know process of actually going in and sort of modifying the information now
they also say that they are you're able inside the application to transform your scanned documents
into high quality pdfs actually privacy and security and being able to bring them into google
drive but also the ability to use fingerprint or face scanning as a sort of way to back up now it's
really interesting because you can actually import existing pdfs into the system from your camera
roll and also there's no ads or in-app purchases or watermarks which is pretty good now one of
the technologies inside of stack that's pretty interesting for me at least is the ability to scan
the document for stuff like due dates total amount due and information you wouldn't necessarily get
from a traditional sort of uploader and be able to pinpoint that in a bit more detail now that's
definitely a huge win for people that are looking for more context to some of their receipts and to
be able to save accountants time and things like that so it's a really interesting addition here
now google stack it doesn't really state whether they're sort of gonna progress this out further
but they do state this is an experimental application for android right now in its early
days and they do also mention that their algorithm still gets things wrong but i definitely see how
this application could be pretty helpful i think what they're trying to do as well is to make that
bridge between google drive and your mobile device to be a lot better one of the things
google struggled with in the past is the ability to actually manage documents and manage uploads
as well as say for example evernote or another application that's dedicated to uploading
so i think stack is going to try and bridge that gap between google drive now you're
probably wondering where is this going to go in the future now to be honest it really depends on
how far this project progresses right now it seems to be doing fairly well without any sort of push
from google they obviously post and announce it but largely it makes sort of its attention from
just being on the android us store and that sort of market being around so it's really
interesting to see it in my opinion i think that google should probably just weave this into their
existing system with google drive allowing it as part of say a google workspace upgrade
just so that they can monetize it and really take it a bit further because it's a really interesting
technology and personally i'd love to have the ability to stack feature inside of google drive
maybe that's not even called stack that automates that sort of process of scanning a document and
being able to upload it to the system now it's really interesting i think as well that they were
brought in from this socratic program if you haven't seen socratic you'll be pretty amazed
at the technology that they were able to weave in here it's still really popular on the ios google
the ios app store it's actually got something like half a million ratings and it's like a 4.9 and a
lot of people love this application if we had this in school i'm sure a lot of us would be a
lot further than they are now but the technology definitely promises something that i think a lot
of people would like in the professional space being able to upload documents pretty fast anyway
folks i hope you enjoyed this feature today google snack is an interesting technology
and something that i think in area one two zero google are continuing to expand on and see how the
project goes thank you very much folks and i look forward to seeing you in a future video cheerio
you