Google Is Adding an ‘AI Inbox’ to Gmail That Summarizes Emails

Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new “AI Inbox” tab, currently in beta testing, that reads each message in a user’s Gmail and suggests a list of summarized actions and key topics.

In Google’s example of what this AI inbox might look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user’s messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, respond to a request from their child’s sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. There’s also a list of important topics to browse under the AI ​​Inbox tab, located below the Action item at the top. Each suggested task and topic links back to the original email for more context and verification.

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Despite the continued proliferation of generic AI features, the inherent reliability of these tools remains unstable. In 2023, when Google’s chatbot was still called “Bard,” I tested the company’s new Gmail extension, which attempted to summarize my messages and search through the inbox for insights. At the time, this extension was a complete failure, with a plethora of incorrect responses.

Since then, Google has worked to improve its base AI model, called Gemini, and integrate those improvements into its suite of existing software services, including Gmail as well as Search. Despite the company’s advances in AI, current Gmail users are still shown a disclaimer stating that Gemini “may make mistakes” when attempting to search the inbox and answer questions.

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For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google collects by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company’s basic AI models. “We didn’t just apply AI to Gmail,” says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for 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 to.

At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made several Gemini features free to all Gmail users that were previously only available to paying customers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from user prompts, as well as AI Overview for email threads, which essentially adds a TL on top of longer message threads; DR posts summary.

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

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