Google is adding an “AI inbox” to Gmail that summarizes emails

As part of its goal to further personalize users’ inboxes and improve search, Google is bringing even more generative artificial intelligence tools to Gmail. On Thursday, the company announced a novel “AI Inbox” tab, currently in beta testing, that reads every message in a user’s Gmail and suggests a to-do list and key topics based on the summary.

In Google’s example of what this AI inbox in Gmail might look like, the novel tab pulls context from the user’s messages and suggests them postpone their dentist appointment, respond to a request from their child’s sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. The AI ​​Inbox tab also has a list of significant topics worth reviewing, located at the top under action items. Each suggested task and topic links to the original email where you can get more context and review.

Despite the continued proliferation of generative AI capabilities, the fundamental reliability of these tools remains uncertain. In 2023, when Google’s chatbot was still called “Bard,” I was testing the company’s emerging Gmail extension that tried to summarize my messages and search my inbox for insights. At the time, this extension was a complete flop and had a lot of wrong answers.

Since then, Google has worked to improve its core artificial intelligence model, called Gemini, and integrated those improvements into a suite of existing software services, including Gmail and search. Despite the company’s advances in artificial intelligence, current Gmail users are still shown a disclaimer stating that Gemini “may make errors” when trying to search their inbox and answer questions.

For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google collects while browsing their inboxes will not be used to improve the company’s underlying AI models. “We didn’t just bring artificial intelligence to Gmail,” says Blake Barnes, who leads the project at Google. “We have created a secure privacy architecture especially for this moment.” It emphasizes that users can disable Gmail’s novel AI tools if they don’t want them.

At the same time, Google announced AI Inbox and made many Gemini features available for free to all Gmail users that were previously only available to paid subscribers. This includes Help Me Write toolwhich generates emails based on user prompts, as well as AI reviews for email threads which essentially puts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads.

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

Courtesy of Google