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December 9, 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already working on solutions for some of humanity's biggest challenges: accelerating drug development, improving early cancer detection, and fighting climate change. But perhaps none of these tasks is as daunting as the one Google has set for its AI bot Gemini: tackling email chaos.
Gemini is now part of Gmail, both in the web version and on mobile devices. In addition to helping you compose emails, Gemini can also summarize long emails and entire conversations for you. This article explores how this summarization feature works and other capabilities of Gemini in Gmail. It also assesses the current reliability of the tool.
An important note upfront: Currently, Gemini in Gmail is only available if you or your employer pay for Google One AI Premium ($20 per month) or a Google Workspace account.
There are several ways to use Gemini summaries in Gmail, provided the feature is enabled for your account. Most options are accessible via the Gemini logo, a distinctive black star shape. In the web version, click the Gemini button in the top right corner of Gmail to open the side panel. There you'll find summaries for your entire inbox or for the currently open email thread.
In the Gmail app for Android and iOS, the Gemini button appears in the upper right corner when you're looking at a list of emails, or at the top center when you're viewing a specific email thread. On mobile, there's also a "Summarize this email" button that appears when you're looking at a single email or email thread.
This "Summarize this email" button is the easiest way to get started. However, you can also ask Gemini to "summarize today's emails," "summarize this week's emails," "summarize my unread emails," or "summarize the emails I received last month"—or give similar instructions. After Gemini thinks for a moment, you'll get a response on the screen, along with follow-up questions you might want to ask (e.g., you can request a longer summary).
The results are presented as a series of bullet points, including the sources. Click or tap these sources to see the individual emails the information came from. Icons next to the responses also let you copy the text elsewhere, give feedback on the Gemini response in the form of a thumbs up or thumbs down, or clear the AI chat history.
Gemini's capabilities in Gmail go beyond summarizing. You can ask Gemini practically any question about your inbox, and the tool will at least attempt to provide an answer by scouring the gigabytes of data in your emails for answers.
For example, you could ask, "What have I and person@email.com been writing about lately?" or "What's the name of the hotel I stayed at in Glasgow?". The AI can surface details from your inbox that would otherwise take a lot of effort to find—like where something is taking place or what the outcome of a particular decision was.
You can ask who emails you most frequently about a particular topic, or what topic a particular person mentions most often. However, Gemini sometimes struggles with specifics. For example, it can't tell you how many emails you've received in a given time period or pull dates from your emails (you're simply referred to Google Calendar—though this integration could come later).
Some Gemini responses are simply standard Gmail searches. For instance, asking for your most important emails will give you the results of an "is:important" query in the search bar. If you want to see all the unread emails in your inbox, Gemini simply uses the "is:unread" search. It’s usually easier to conduct these searches yourself than to open Gemini and ask for them.
It's no secret that AI hallucinates and makes mistakes. At the end of every Gemini prompt in Gmail, there’s a disclaimer about errors, advising you to double-check any information the tool provides. These AI bots are, by their nature, not designed to simply regurgitate or copy information like a simple Gmail search would—they’re designed to make inferences and connections, so there’s always a margin for error.
The question is whether the convenience of these tools is worth the risk of occasionally shaky results. In my tests, Gemini summarized messages impressively well most of the time. I never experienced it completely fabricating something not mentioned in an email, though it did occasionally miss a key point or two in its summaries.
I wouldn't necessarily rely on Gemini to summarize a long email thread from my boss and pull out the most important details and statistics. I’d rather do that myself. But summarizing a year’s worth of emails with relatives to find the best conversation topics for the next family gathering? I could see myself doing that. I wouldn’t even have to open the emails.
It's particularly useful to have Gemini summarize emails from the past week or month—though, of course, the likelihood of something important being missed increases with the amount of data you’re giving the tool. This may or may not matter to you, of course. If you have thousands of emails you’re never going to read anyway, you might as well see what Gemini makes of them before you archive them.
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