AI in Gmail will sift through emails, provide search summaries, send emails

Google’s Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar.

That’s simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it. Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can’t do with any other interface.

Google’s one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of “sources” at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, “Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent’s group event,” hits “enter,” and then the chatbot instantly sends an email. We thought it was interesting that the demo never showed a confirmation step, but a Google rep contacted us later to say the production version would show you the message before sending it.

Another very interesting feature is the ability to summarize several emails around a certain topic. One example is “compare my roof repair bids by price and availability,” which gathered up and summarized emails from multiple contacts, showing prices from each contractor.

Google is only calling this “Gemini Pro in Workspace Labs,” and it will be out this month.

This was updated at 8:35pm after clarification from about the confirmation step

Listing image by Google