Gmail on smartphones is getting better AI integration with Gemini

Google is preparing to bring Gemini to a place it desperately needs: the Gmail app for smartphones. The company announced today at its I/O developer conference that starting next month, Workspace and Google One AI Premium subscribers will be able to use Gemini to summarize emails for them within the Gmail app. Google says that later, users will be able to access Gemini from Gmail both in the app and on the web to ask questions about their email or have it write responses based on the context of the email.

The response suggestions, called “Contextual Smart Reply,” will work like the current Smart Reply feature, only more “detailed and nuanced.” Other features will be available through a new Gemini button in the Gmail app. Google says that tapping the button will display suggestions like “summarize this email” or “suggest a reply.” Users can also type a request to ask about emails.

These are often things you can already do in other ways: in the Google app, for example, you can ask about your emails, and Workspace Labs testers can use prompt-based AI-generated responses in the Gmail app. But there’s no doubt that it would be useful to have deeper Gemini functionality in the restricted environment of the Gmail app on a smartphone, especially if you’re a professional who receives dozens of emails a day.

People who want to test the in-app summaries feature will be able to do so starting this month, ahead of its later launch. Contextual Smart Reply and Gmail Q&A will launch as experimental features in Workspace Labs in July. However, Google has not offered a clear timeline for its official launch.