Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, is gaining a more prominent place in your inbox with the launch of email summary cards, which will appear at the top of your emails. The company announced Thursday that users would have to tap an option to summarize an email with AI. However, the AI will now automatically summarize the content when needed, without requiring user interaction.
When Gemini launched in the side panel of Gmail last year, one of the features allowed users to summarize their long email threads, along with other tools like those to draft email messages or see suggested responses, among other things.
Now, Google is putting the AI to work on your inbox, whether or not it’s something you want to use.
The update is another example of how AI is quickly infiltrating the software and services people use the most, even though AI summaries aren’t always reliable. When Apple rolled out AI summaries for app push notifications, for example, the BBC found the feature made repeated mistakes when summarizing news headlines. Apple ended up pausing the AI summaries for news apps.
Google’s own AI Overviews feature for Search has also repeatedly made mistakes, offering poor quality and inaccurate information at times.
With the new email summary cards, Gemini will list a longer email’s key points and will then continue to update that synopsis as replies arrive.
The feature won’t replace the option to manually click a button to summarize an email, Google notes. That will still appear as a chip at the top of the email and in Gmail’s Gemini side panel.
The feature is initially available only for emails in English.
Depending on your region, the summary cards may be turned on or off by default. (For instance, smart features are turned off in the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and Japan, Google’s help documentation notes.) Others can choose to enable or disable the feature from Gmail’s Settings under “Smart features.” Workplace admins can also opt to disable the personalization settings for users from the Admin console.
