Hugging Face wants to use AI to make building spreadsheets a little less miserable.
The company, which helps developers build and launch AI-powered apps, announced Thursday that it has created a new spreadsheet-building platform called Sheets. This is not to be confused with Google Sheets. The new tool from Hugging Face is built with generative AI at its core and is designed to be accessible for even the most non-tech-savvy users.
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“Sheets requires no technical expertise, making advanced AI-powered data creation accessible to professionals across all skill levels,” Hugging Face said in a press release. “The intuitive interface, combined with natural language processing, ensures that anyone can harness the power of AI for data work.”
What does Sheets offer?
Like most consumer-facing AI tools, Sheets is being positioned as a time-saving tool that can liberate human users from the tyranny of mundane tasks.
You can generate entire spreadsheets by feeding the system a single, even somewhat vague text prompt, such as: “Get me startup funding data for 2024.” Or you could upload a document and ask the system, for example, to outline the number of times particular keywords are mentioned.
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ChatGPT can also be prompted in natural language to generate spreadsheets, which users can copy and paste or turn into downloadable files. Claude, meanwhile, can’t generate spreadsheets on its own, but it can be integrated into Google Sheets.
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The new platform from Hugging Face stands apart from other AI spreadsheet-generation tools across a handful of key metrics, according to the company:
- Sheets generates spreadsheets “significantly faster” than other AI tools.
- It offers a more fine-grained level of user control, including features like “real-time data translation and summarization” and the option for users to edit individual cells.
- The size and scale of the spreadsheets it can create are larger than those of other AI tools.
- The system is integrated with web search, enabling it to continually refine its output and reduce hallucination.
- Finally, it can be integrated with other apps, making it easy for users to get more detailed analyses of their datasets and incorporate their spreadsheets into existing workflows.
AI from the ground up
While AI tools are making it easier to quickly generate and manage spreadsheets, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel remain the most widely used spreadsheet apps worldwide. Some AI features have been embedded into those platforms to streamline data entry and analysis; Google’s Gemini chatbot, for example, can be embedded into Sheets.
Hugging Face is aiming to differentiate itself by building AI into the foundation of its new spreadsheet tool, which it’s marketing to researchers, data analysts, and other professionals.
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