AI features are becoming a core part of the experience for using anything Google. Now, the Gmail app will create AI summaries for you!

As discussed in Ars Technica (The Gmail app will now create AI summaries whether you want them or not, written by Ryan Whitham and available here), Google says AI summaries will be generated and displayed automatically in the Gmail app for Android and iOS.

Before this latest change, you had to tap the “Summarize this email” chip at the top of the screen to generate an AI summary of the message contents. Google has decided to make this automatic for emails “where a summary is helpful.” That means messages that are longer or threads that contain multiple replies. The announcement is a bit vague about how much detail will trigger a summary, but it probably won’t take much, as Google wants people interacting with AI features as much as possible.

Gmail’s AI summaries use Gemini to generate a brief list of bullet points that break down the content of the thread. It appears at the top of the app, which may not be ideal. In the same way that AI Overviews appear at the top of search results and push the actual search results farther out of reach, Gmail’s AI summaries take up valuable real estate at the top of the screen.

The automatic summaries will appear for all paid Workspace accounts, as well as individual accounts with Google AI Premium subscriptions. It’s unclear whether standard Gmail accounts will get the expanded summaries, but the move appears to be a step toward making summaries the default for everyone. Likewise, Google could easily expand the use of summaries in the web version of Gmail at any time.

While the article says “it may take up to 15 days for this change to roll out to everyone”, I’m already seeing it in my Gmail app on the iPhone. And I’m seeing it for as few as three emails within a thread. 😊

Of course, the question is: how comprehensive will the summaries be when the thread is long? Probably not very, as it seems you only get two or three bullet points in the summary, even for email threads as long as 14 emails (which is the longest I checked). That’s a lot of yadda, yadda, yadda being left out, just sayin’! 🤣

So, what do you think? Are you excited that the Gmail app will create AI summaries for you – automatically? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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