Here are a few new ways Google’s AI will be truly helpful

Google has recently announced a series of new features and expansions for Gemini that will further enhance its capabilities across Google Workspace apps. While I’m clearly a bit anti-AI in Google core search product, that doesn’t mean I don’t see the utility it can provide in countless other areas. And these new Workspace features are a great example of how adding AI to existing products can simply make them easier to use, more powerful, and far more useful for everyone.

Gemini 1.5 Pro in the Side Panel

First up, Gemini in the Workspace side panel has been upgraded to Gemini 1.5 Pro, offering more advanced reasoning and a longer context window. This translates to a more insightful and comprehensive AI assistant right within your Gmail, Docs, Drive, Slides, and Sheets.

What does this mean for users? Gemini can now tackle complex questions, summarize lengthy email threads, and even pull information from your Drive files directly into your emails. Imagine finding details for an upcoming event or summarizing months of a never-ending email thread with a single prompt. This powerful feature will be rolling out soon to Workspace Labs, Gemini for Workspace Alpha users, and Google One AI Premium subscribers.

The Gmail app is getting a Gemini boost

Google is also bringing new features to the Gmail mobile app to streamline your workflow on the go when you have to work from your pocket. These features, starting with Workspace Labs users, should positively impact how you handle email on your mobile device.

• Summarize Emails: Quickly digest long email threads with concise summaries directly in the app.
• Contextual Smart Reply: Get even more tailored and relevant suggestions for email replies based on the context of your conversations.
• Gmail Q&A: Ask Gemini specific questions about your inbox, such as “Find the roofing contractor’s bid” or “What are the book club discussion questions?”

Help me write is now multilingual

To stretch out and help even more users, Gemini’s “Help me write” feature in Gmail and Docs will soon support Spanish and Portuguese on desktop, with more languages to follow. With Google’s extensive real-time translation abilities across multiple apps and services, I’d guess more languages coming to “Help me write” won’t take very long. This is an area Google’s been investing in for years at this point.

With truly useful updates like these, Gemini continues moving towards being an indispensable part of the Google Workspace experience. Again, I’m not anti-AI, but I really think Google needs to focus in and deliver well on these sorts of applications of it. When AI can assist users to make menial tasks simpler, it becomes a tool to get things done. And I think Google is in a spot to leverage AI in these sorts of ways better than anyone else doing it right now.