Google’s AI now lets you talk to your Gmail inbox

Google isn’t finished infusing AI into your inbox. On Tuesday, the tech giant announced an expansion of its “AI Inbox” functionality for Gmail, which is adding conversational AI features. That means you can ask Gmail about things in your inbox instead of typing in search terms.

The company says the Gemini AI-powered feature, called Gmail Live, will help you quickly find information buried in your inbox.

Perhaps you need information about your upcoming flight, the time of your dentist appointment, the door code for your Airbnb rental, or some details about an event at your kid’s school, for instance.

Before, you’d have to type in keywords in the search box (or maybe type in someone’s email address or domain) to try to narrow down your search. That doesn’t always make emails easy to find, however, especially if the search term is something found across several messages.

“Gmail Live can answer naturally phrased questions, respond to follow-up questions, and pivot if you need to interrupt it,” Devanshi Bhandari, product lead for Gmail, explained in a briefing ahead of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, where the feature was first introduced to the public.

It’s another way that Google is trying to showcase how its AI technology can drive real-world improvements to products used by millions of consumers, at a time when many outside the tech industry are questioning the value of AI, as new data centers get built in their backyards, driving up their power bills.

Being able to point to something as simple as making it easier to find something that’s lost in your email inbox — an experience nearly everyone has suffered at some point — could be a practical and positive use case for AI … or at least, Google hopes.

Bhandari demonstrated Gmail Live to reporters, asking the tool a series of questions about things in the inbox, like a child’s show-and-tell project and their class trip, plus hotel and flight information for a trip to Detroit. Similar to using a stand-alone AI chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT, Gmail users can ask these questions aloud in natural language, and the chatbot responds.

In the demo, Gmail Live also understood nuances between things like “field trip” and “trip” and was able to jump from one topic to another, Bhandari pointed out. Plus, the AI can pull granular details from emails, like a hotel room number, or infer which people you’re asking about, even when they’re not explicitly named.

Similar voice technology is also coming to its to-do list, Google Keep, the company noted.

Notably, Gmail Live is not replacing traditional Gmail search — it’s just another option.

Google may have learned that not everyone is ready for an AI-only experience after it “upgraded” Google Photos with AI-powered search to much backlash. Google Photos later rolled back the feature, making the use of AI optional after numerous complaints.

Gmail is also gaining other new capabilities, including ready-to-send drafts, instant file access, and the ability to manage to-dos by marking individual tasks as done.

Plus, the AI Inbox experience, which launched earlier this year, will expand beyond Google AI Ultra subscribers to reach Google AI Pro and Plus subscribers as well. This allows you to see an overview of the tasks and items to catch up on that are buried in your inbox, all on one page.

The voice-powered Gmail Live feature, however, will roll out later this summer and will initially be limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers.

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