How (and when) to use Gemini AI in Gmail and Google Docs

Productive artificial intelligence is almost everywhere right now, finding its way into academic papers, student essays, digital ebooks, police reports, tech blogs, and many other places besides. Now it’s very easy to produce thousands of words on almost any topic you can think of, with a few clicks and well-chosen commands—and Google is willing to help users participate in this development of AI content production, adding writing tools powered by its power. Gemini chatbot in Gmail, Google Docs, and other applications.

Note that, currently, these features are only available if you or your organization pay for Google Workspace or subscribe to the Google One AI Premium plan—but they may filter down to personal accounts in the future. Here’s where this powerful Gemini writing aid comes from, how to use it, and how to best deploy it.

Gemini AI in Gmail

AI has been in Gmail for a few years now, in features like Smart Reply and Smart Compose, but the addition of Gemini takes text formatting to a whole new level. Start writing a new email in Gmail on the web, and you will see a small pen with a star next to it in the bottom toolbar: Click this, and you can enter the information of all your email. As a general rule, the more detailed the information, the better the results.

Once Gemini has done its thinking, you can rate the results by thumbs up or thumbs down. You can click Enter to accept the text and add any editing you like to it, or you can click on the Refine button below to make changes—it’ll help you shorten the prose, clarify what’s already set, or make it more formal, for example.

These text editing options can also be applied to email text you’ve written using human logic—just click the pen icon, as before. Based on the testing I’ve done, this is where Gemini is most useful, especially for condensing long emails. However, you’ll still need to double-check them to make sure they haven’t missed anything important.

Being able to create text that sounds and sounds natural like this is an impressive feat, but it’s hard to know who you might want to send an AI-generated email to. You’re not a friend or family member, are you? Maybe not your boss or colleagues, either. Maybe AI can be used to weed out boring admin emails? But since hindsight is always dangerous, you may find yourself agreeing to pay double the cost of your broadband.

One of my test orders was “write to the editor of Gizmodo saying how great the book is and what a fan I am, I’ve read it for over 10 years”. The responses were fine, up to a point, but rather stiff and fuzzy—as if they were the condensed and measured results of a million thank-you notes and thank-you letters (which is how this all works).

Gemini also appears as Summarize this email button at the top of the email thread in Gmail, and it can list things that can be done from the email thread, too, with the Gemini button (top right). This works really well, and I find it useful—as long as your emails aren’t important enough that missing a detail or two will matter.

Gemini AI in Google Docs

As it currently stands in Google Docs with Gemini enabled, as soon as you create a blank document you will be met with Help me write fast, high. Click this, and you can enter information to generate text on anything you like: Opening chapters of novels, meeting agendas, explanations of how DNA works in the body… whatever you need to be inspired by.

The Gemini AI button (the little blue pen with a star next to it) follows you as you type, right next to the comment buttons and emoji buttons. You can use it to break down short sentences or long blocks of text whenever you like—and you can ask it to continue in the same style and tone as what’s already on the page.

Most of the time, you’ll find the same standard text you’re used to from Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot. My efforts to get Gemini to write the pitch for a television show that “brings together the best bits of Twin Peaks, Westworld, The Leftovers, and Presumed Innocent” led to—and you may have heard some of these phrases before—the creation of “complex characters,” a painful past,” and a small town where “reality is not what it seems.”

Like Gmail, the summary and rewrite features are probably the most useful here. You can select text before clicking the AI ​​pen button to edit it, and you can use the Gemini star button (upper right corner) to get text summaries, reword certain blocks of text, or come up with new supported ideas. from what you have already written.

For writers, the option to quickly rewrite or rename small chunks of text makes Gemini very useful—it’s like a supercharged thesaurus. Generating large blocks of text, however, has its limits, unless you want to write something simple and forgettable (and possibly full of errors, depending on what you’re writing about). And remember that Google Docs keeps a revision history, which shows large chunks of text that appear next to your name…

Personally, I can’t think of a situation where I would ever ask a generative AI to compose a new script for me that I wouldn’t rather just write and research myself. Technology has more promise when it comes to summarizing, and coming up with new ideas, and maybe that’s where it will find its place: A writing assistant rather than a replacement for a writer.