Google adds an ‘AI inbox’ to Gmail that summarizes emails

Google is putting more productivity AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize users’ inboxes and simplify searches. The company on Thursday announced a new tab called “AI Inbox,” which is currently in a beta testing phase, and which reads every 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 an AI inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user’s messages and suggests they reschedule a dentist appointment, respond to a request from their child’s athletic coach, and pay an upcoming fee before a deadline. Also under the AI ​​Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, located below the action items at the top. Each suggested topic and tasks link to the original email for more context and verification.

Courtesy of Google

Despite the continued proliferation of generative AI features, the fundamental reliability of these tools remains unclear. In 2023, when Google’s chatbot was still called “Bard,” I tested the company’s nascent Gmail extension that tried to summarize my messages and search my inbox for insights. At the time, this extension was a complete failure, with a host of incorrect responses.

Since then, Google has been improving its core AI model, called Gemini, and incorporating these improvements into its existing suite of software services, including Gmail as well as search. Despite the company’s advances in AI, existing Gmail users are still shown a disclaimer stating that Gemini “can make errors” when trying to search their inbox and answer questions.

For users concerned about their privacy, the information Google collects by browsing inboxes will no longer be used to improve the company’s core AI models. “We didn’t just integrate AI into Gmail,” says Blake Barnes, who leads the project at Google. “We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment.” He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail’s new AI tools if they don’t want them.

At the same time that Google announced AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users many Gemini features that were previously only available to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as the AI ​​Overview of Email Threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long threads.

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

Courtesy of Google