Google Is Adding an ‘AI Inbox’ to Gmail That Summarizes Emails

Google is integrating even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize users’ inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new “AI Inbox” tab, currently in beta testing, that reads each message in a user’s Gmail and suggests a list of key tasks and topics, based on what it summarizes.

In Google’s example of what this AI inbox might look like in Gmail, the new tab takes the context of a user’s messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, respond to a request from their child’s sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI ​​Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, tucked under the action items at the top. Each suggested task and topic links back to the original email for more context and verification.

Courtesy of Google

Despite the continued diffusion of generative AI capabilities, the underlying reliability of these tools remains uncertain. In 2023, when Google’s chatbot was still called “Bard,” I tested the company’s nascent Gmail extension that attempted to summarize my messages and search for information in the inbox. At the time, this extension was a total failure, with a multitude of incorrect answers.

Since then, Google has worked to improve its core AI model, called Gemini, and integrate those improvements into its existing suite of software services, including Gmail and Search. Despite the company’s advances in AI, current Gmail users still see a warning that Gemini “may make errors” when trying to search an inbox and answer questions.

For privacy-conscious users, the information Google gleans from scanning inboxes won’t be used to improve the company’s core AI models. “We didn’t just put AI into Gmail,” says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. “We have built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment.” He points out that users can turn off Gmail’s new AI tools if they don’t want to.

At the same time that Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made several Gemini features that were previously only available to paid subscribers available to all Gmail users for free. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI previews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long-form message threads.

Subscribers to Google’s Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 per month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more refined grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your entire inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single thread.

Courtesy of Google