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Google is adding several Gemini 3-powered features to the free version of Gmail, including a new AI Inbox that promises to filter out clutter and AI Overviews of your messages.
"Email has changed considerably since Gmail launched in 2004," Google says. "With email volume at an all-time high, managing your inbox and the flow of information has become as important as the emails themselves."
AI Overviews for Gmail
The first is AI Overviews for email, which most people should already be familiar with from Google Search (whether you like it or not). They will summarize a long email thread into "key points," Google says. Apple does the same in the Mail app, and it can be dicey if it misinterprets or skips over major themes, so it remains to be seen how effective Google's version is.
Perhaps more promising is the ability to ask Gemini questions about your inbox instead of rooting around for an elusive email. "Instead of hunting for keywords or digging through a year of emails, just use natural language, like 'Who was the plumber that gave me a quote for the bathroom renovation last year?'" Google says. "Gemini’s advanced reasoning pulls the answer, instantly summarizing the exact details you need."
AI Overview conversation summaries are rolling out today for everyone for free. If you want to ask questions with AI Overviews, however, you'll need a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription.
AI Inbox
Google already offers AI summaries of individual emails for Workspace users, but its new AI Inbox taps Gemini to crawl your entire inbox and create a list of recommended to-dos.
The option for AI Inbox will appear on the left-hand menu. According to Google, AI Inbox is like "having a personalized briefing" that will filter out "the clutter so you can focus on what's important." It identifies emails from "your VIPs based on signals like people you email frequently, those in your contacts list and relationships it can infer from message content."
Better hope it's a good judge of that, but to be fair it's on the human to make sure not to trust the AI too much. You probably want to manually review your inbox every so often to make sure you didn't miss something important.
Google claims all this AI analysis "happens securely with the privacy protections you expect from Google, keeping your data under your control." The company is treading lightly, though, and will only make AI Inbox available broadly "in the coming months" after giving it to "trusted testers."
'Help Me Write' for Everyone
Google's AI writing tool, Help Me Write, has been available for Workspace Gmail users since last year following a Workspace Labs test-run, but it's now rolling out to everyone for free.
Similar to Apple's Writing Tools, Help Me Write can polish and proofread emails you've already written, or draft them from scratch with the click of a button.
Starting next month, Google will update Help Me Write to bring context "from your other Google apps." (Help Me Write is also available for Google Docs, Chrome, and on Chromebooks.) One of the company's biggest advantages in the AI space is its wide ecosystem of products, so there's no surprise that the company is trying to bring in all the data it has on you already.
A new Proofread feature, meanwhile, will offer "advanced grammar, tone and style checks so everything is polished before you send." Google is also rebranding Smart Replies as Suggested Replies, which offer suggestions on what to write as you type. Google says both options will "match how you write"; hopefully it's more convincing than a ChatGPT-written message.
Suggested Replies are rolling out to everyone at no cost, but Proofread requires a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription.