Latest news with #smartreplies
Phone Arena
21-05-2025
- Phone Arena
Gmail Smart Replies are changing again, and Google's version goes way beyond short phrases
One of the biggest updates is coming to Gmail's smart replies. Instead of offering short and generic suggestions like "Sounds good" or "Thanks," Gemini will now pull context from your past emails and files in Google Drive. That means if you're replying to someone about a shared document or an ongoing conversation, the AI can suggest responses that include more specific details. It also learns your usual tone, whether it's formal or more relaxed, so replies can sound more like you. Gemini is also stepping in to help manage your inbox. If you're buried under unread messages or old emails, the AI can now help clean things up. You can ask it to delete or archive emails based on certain criteria, like 'Delete all unread emails from last year from The Groomed Paw.' It's a way to get through inbox clutter without doing it all improvement focuses on scheduling. Trying to set up a meeting with someone outside your company usually means a lot of back-and-forth emails. Gemini now recognizes when you're trying to schedule something and can suggest times or even help you share your booking page directly from Gmail. This could cut down the time it takes to confirm a smarter replies are expected to roll out later this year, but the inbox cleanup and scheduling tools are coming sooner, sometime in the next quarter. Google shared these updates as part of its larger push to bring Gemini into more of its Workspace apps. This isn't just about Gmail — it's part of a bigger effort to create an AI system that works across your daily tools such as Docs, Drive, and Calendar. These updates won't change how Gmail looks, but they could make common tasks like replying, organizing, and scheduling a bit faster. For anyone who deals with a lot of emails every day, that may be a welcome change.
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Forbes
Google Confirms Gmail Upgrade Offer—You Must Decide Carefully
Be very careful what you do next Here we are again. Google has just offered a huge upgrade choice for its 2 billion Gmail users, and this time you need to decide very carefully before jumping onboard. We are heading quickly into uncharted territory, and there's likely no turning back. Following hot on the heels of AI-fueled relevancy search, Google has now teased a much more wholesale AI change to Gmail. Smart replies — which have been evolving anyway — will now use your past emails and even Google Drive data to better mimic your tone and style and even shape the content of how you reply to emails. 'Gmail is getting personalized smart replies that incorporate your context and tone,' Google says. 'Draft replies will sound authentically like you and match your typical tone, as the responses are created from past emails and Drive files.' But as The Verge explains, 'the improvements build on Google's 'contextual' upgrade to smart replies it introduced last year… But they could still only bring in information from the Gmail thread you were in. With the changes announced today, smart replies will theoretically be able to include a lot more context than before.' This upgrade will roll out across both Android and iOS as well as the web. As ever, it will be limited to English to begin with and then will expand. Perhaps more than any other change, this is the tipping point for users. How much is too much and where exactly is the trade off between convenience and privacy when it comes to email. There is also a disconnect at the center of the latest upgrades coming to Gmail. Its introduction of a form of end-to-end encryption is incompatible with the various AI upgrades it is also introducing. AI can't see encrypted emails. At some point there needs to be a policy statement as to where email is actually heading. For home users crafting the perfect reply to a contractor or moving the weekend's dinner plans, this will be fine. But apply these upgrades to an enterprise setting and we start to see a raft of concerns as AI runs wild across private, confidential, sensitive data. Per Android Authority, 'of course, enabling this feature means giving Gemini permission to access your emails and scan the contents of your Google Drive. So, if privacy is a concern, the feature may not be for you.' As fun as all this sounds, I would urge caution before jumping in — we are still at the early stages of these changes, and we have no clue yet as to the privacy and security risks millions if not billions of users will now be taking. 'Try it yourself later this year,' Google says. Decide carefully.
The Verge
20-05-2025
- The Verge
Gmail's smart replies will use AI to pull context from your inbox and Drive
Gmail's smart replies, which suggest potential replies to your emails, will be able to pull information from your Gmail inbox and from your Google Drive and better match your tone and style, all with help from Gemini, the company announced at I/O. The improvements build on Google's 'contextual' upgrade to smart replies it introduced last year. That change allowed responses to be longer than before, meaning smart replies could be more than a short 'Sounds good!' But they could still only bring in information from the Gmail thread you were in. With the changes announced today, smart replies will theoretically be able to include a lot more context than before. The idea is that 'Gemini can understand the situation that you need to respond to' and take over the task of 'digging through all the other files' and rereading long threads to make sure the response has all the right information, Google Workspace's VP of product, Blake Barnes, tells The Verge. Smart replies can also now account for tone and style based on the person you're talking to, meaning it might suggest more formal replies if you're emailing your manager or more casual ones if you're going back and forth with a friend. 'We're moving from a place where AI is broadly helpful to AI that's helpful for you,' Barnes says. There's the chance that a lot of people end up using this: Barnes declined to share a specific figure of how many people use smart replies, but says that 'there are plenty of people that do.' But as with all AI-generated text, you'll want to double-check that it didn't hallucinate anything before you actually hit send. It would look pretty embarrassing if the smart replies mess up an important fact in an email you send to your boss, after all. The smart replies will be available in English at first, on the web, iOS, and Android and will launch in alpha in Google Labs in July. The feature is expected to become generally available in Q3 of this year. You'll have to pay for these fancier smart replies, though, as they'll launch as part of paid Workspace plans and as part of Google One AI Premium. Over time, it's 'possible' the feature could come to free Workspace users, Barnes says. At I/O, Google announced some other features for Gmail, too. Gemini will be able to help you manage your inbox, like by asking the AI assistant to delete unread emails from a certain sender with a feature it calls 'inbox cleanup.' The tool will be generally available in the third quarter. When you're trying to book a meeting with somebody, Gmail will also use Gemini to show a prompt to suggest proposing times from your calendar. This feature will also be generally available in Q3. Google also announced other features coming to Workspace products, including speech translation in Google Meet, AI avatars in Google Vids, and the ability for Gemini to just pull information from linked documents in a Google Doc when offering writing assistance.
