New ways to engage with Gemini for Workspace

Today at Google I/O we’re announcing new, powerful ways to get more done in your personal and professional life with Gemini for Google Workspace. Gemini in the side panel of your favorite Workspace apps is rolling out more broadly and will use the 1.5 Pro model for answering a wider array of questions and providing more insightful responses. We’re also bringing more Gemini capabilities to your Gmail app on mobile, helping you accomplish more on the go. Lastly, we’re showcasing how Gemini will become the connective tissue across multiple applications with AI-powered workflows. And all of this comes fresh on the heels of the innovations and enhancements we announced last month at Google Cloud Next.

Access Gemini 1.5 Pro in a refreshed side panel of your Workspace apps

Since its launch, more than a million people and tens of thousands of companies have used generative AI in Workspace to help them be more creative, boost their productivity, and transform how they work. They’ve used Gemini for Workspace features such as Help me write in Docs and Gmail, Help me design in Slides, and Help me organize in Sheets. Today, we’re starting the roll out of a refreshed and more powerful side panel experience to our Workspace Labs and Gemini for Workspace Alpha users. We’re looking forward to bringing that experience to all our Gemini for Workspace customers and Google One AI Premium subscribers next month.

With the new side panel experience, coming first to Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, you’ll be able to chat with Gemini to summarize, analyze, and generate content, leveraging insights from your emails, documents, and more — all without leaving the app you're in. The refreshed interface provides an automatic summary of the conversation or content you’re working on, as well as contextually relevant prompts to help get you started.

The new side panel is built to leverage Google’s most powerful models including the Gemini 1.5 Pro model with a longer context window and more advanced reasoning. This can enable it to provide more insightful and accurate responses based on much larger datasets. For example you can ask it to summarize emails from your child’s school or even to highlight the main points from a recording of a PTA meeting you missed.

And most importantly, having Gemini in the Workspace side panel means you don’t have to leave the email or document you’re already in to research, brainstorm, or get additional information. You can get the insights you need, grounded in Google search and the information in your Gmail inbox and Drive. For example, let’s say you’re planning a family reunion and get an email from grandma asking for the hotel information so she can book a room. Now you can ask Gemini to look it up from a Google Doc that contains all the event details, using a simple “what is the hotel name and sales manager email listed in @Family Reunion 2024.” Then you can easily insert this into your reply to get grandma the help she needs.

Staying connected on the go with Gemini in Gmail mobile

Gmail is the largest email service in the world, helping people all over the globe stay connected through their web browser and mobile devices. But when you’re on the go, reading through long email threads can be time consuming and especially challenging on smaller screens. To help with this, Gemini will soon be able to analyze email threads and provide a summarized view with the key highlights directly in the Gmail app, just as you can in the side panel. Summarize in the Gmail app will be available to Workspace Labs this month and become generally available to all Gemini for Workspace customers and Google One AI Premium subscribers next month.

Gmail’s Smart Reply feature is a huge time saver, allowing you to quickly respond to an email with just a tap. But sometimes you need more than a simple “Sounds good to me!” or “Yes, I’m working on it.” That’s where Gemini’s suggested replies can be a real game changer. 

Soon, Contextual Smart Reply will offer longer, more detailed suggestions that can fully capture the intent of your message. No more struggling to craft the perfect response on a tiny screen – Gemini can take the full content of the email into consideration and provide you with thoughtful one-tap options. This is coming to Workspace Labs on mobile and web starting in July.

Suggested replies and summaries can help you move through your inbox faster, but sometimes you need to provide an even more customized response or gather additional insights before replying. Soon, you’ll have the ability to chat with Gemini using Gmail Q&A to get the additional information you need. You can ask Gemini to search your inbox for things like “What time does Chloe’s recital start on Saturday?” or more complex questions that pull information from other emails in your inbox such as “compare my recent roof repair bids by price and availability.” And just like that, you’ll have the information you need to quickly reply without ever leaving the app. Gmail Q&A will be available in Workspace Labs on mobile and web starting in July.

Making your daily workflows easier with Gemini

Many of us work on repetitive tasks and workflows in our day-to-day jobs, whether it’s submitting expense reports, reviewing and approving documents, or updating project management trackers. As we move between apps for these tasks, we often switch tabs and tools and copy/paste data as we go. The whole process can be a burden.

We believe generative AI can serve as the connective tissue between the apps involved in each workflow, helping to make these common tasks easier and quicker to perform.

Imagine you're a freelancer or small business owner and need to manage your business expenses. Your receipts are scattered throughout your Gmail inbox as PDF attachments with no real organizational method. Soon, Gemini will help automatically recognize these types of attachments and offer a helpful prompt to “organize and track” these in Drive and Sheets. This not only saves you the burden of doing this manually as they come in, but you can automate this for any future emails. You can then leverage Gemini in Sheets with Data Q&A for detailed analysis to ask things like “How is my money being spent on business expenses?” or “Show me my expenses by month.” 

This is just one example of how we’ll use Gemini to provide AI-powered workflows for common scenarios that involve Workspace and other Google apps. This particular ability to organize your attachments in Drive, generate a sheet, and do data analysis via Q&A will roll out to Labs users later this year.

Get started today with Gemini for Workspace

We’re working to make Gemini more helpful in the places you need it the most. You can get started with Gemini for Workspace today with a no-cost trial of Google One AI Premium for consumers or with a Gemini for Workspace add-on for our business customers. And if you need a boost with your prompts for Gemini, don’t miss our Prompting Guide 101 or our Beyond the Prompt blog series.