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The Gmail app will now create AI summaries
- advisedwang 1y agoSo now I can use Gmail AI to write the email and the recipient can use Gmail AI to read the email. Perhaps it's time to just start sending the prompt and skip the round trip through a verbose formal message.
- redeux 1y agoGreat idea! You can just send the person you want to communicate with your prompt (via email of course) and then they can reply with their prompt. I'm not sure why we're not all doing this already ...
- htrp 1y agoevery message will be ? and plzhdlthx
- reaperducer 1y agoand plzhdlthx I'd rather have "plzhdlthx" over "Action this."
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoThey're frustrating for the same reason: "this" (implied in the former) is undefined. That is absolutely a valid request. But both parties should at least acknowledge that the requester is scraping shit off their plate.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bravetraveler 1y agoDon't forget: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- orthecreedence 1y agoFinally I can have an AI respond to every email with "Sounds good!!" instead of typing it out myself.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 1y agoYep, recycling a comment from a year ago: > Ultimately a lot of this generative tech stuff is just counterfeiting extra signals people were using to try to guess at interest, attentiveness, intelligence, etc. > So yeah, as those indicators become debased, maybe we'll go back to sending something [...] all boiled down to bullet points.
- kgwxd 1y agoYesterday I noticed the "Upgrade", with a persistent (1) badge on it, in the bottom left corner of the web app, trying to get me to buy some plan with AI features, even after I looked at it. I installed Thunderbird immediately. Never touching Google UI ever again.
- floathub 1y agoKeep going. Here's the next step after Thunderbird: https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html (Hint: Emacs) :-)
- rf15 1y agoglad to hear AI had such a positive impact on your choice of mail client
- chankstein38 1y agoThanks for the recommendation, I went ahead and installed Thunderbird too. Tired of this AI shit being shoved everywhere even if it's unwanted and unhelpful. Done using the Gmail app.
- daft_pink 1y agoHope it’s better than Apple Intelligence, which seems to mash all my different emails together in a one sentence summary even from widely different senders.
- dvt 1y agoIt's actually wild how terrible Apple Intelligence is. You'd get a better summary by literally copy-pasting the email/text message in any LLaMA model, so I'm not even sure what they're doing to get such awful results.
- htrp 1y agolocally crippled models in the name of privacy?
- pk455 1y agomore like privacy as an excuse for crippled models
- hoppp 1y agoThey just suck at AI. They probably joined the game too late so their in house product is still at the "kinda sucks" phase.
- karel-3d 1y agoWhen I tried local llama for this (on a computer), it used tons of battery and memory; I guess it would be hard to use that on mobile device; they probably need to do a lot of work to make it feasible on iOS and locally and it just sucks. On the positive side, I don't feel bad for having iPhone without Apple Intelligence.
- behnamoh 1y agoApple Intelligence had so much promise and so little delivery.
- 1y ago
- xnx 1y agoOne good side effect might be that people write shorter emails since it will be summarized anyway.
- hoppp 1y agoOr they just use an AI to write the email. Nobody reads the original text anyways.
- jbellis 1y ago"for android and ios" imo the article's rather negative tone is not justified here, when I only have a small screen I think I would welcome an AI summary in any case I'm willing to see what it looks like before panning it
- theamk 1y agobest case: it is so full of lies no one trusts it to begin with worst case: it is mostly ok, and only the few emails have opposite summaries. So you are nornally fine, until that "meeting NOT cancelled" email is summarized "meeting is cancelled", and everyone is wondering where you are.
- hollerith 1y agoI'm leaving gmail.com and gmail.app because of how hard they push AI with no way for me to opt out. I've been using them for many years. (I might continue to use my gmail address using POP3 to third-party client software.) I'm a fairly heavy user of LLM services, but don't see the value of "help me write" or "summarize this" or "happening soon" (Gmail's attempt to insert itself into my relationships with shippers and delivery services).
- giancarlostoro 1y agoUsing a desktop email client is my preferred way to use email. I can read them even offline.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a desktop app isn't superior to a website. Web apps are a port in a storm; if I can use a desktop app, I always prefer to.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoGmail has no desktop app, though it has mobile apps. The web or PWA Gmail has more features and settings than any third-party desktop app would offer when using IMAP or POP. Gmail is a custom-designed first-party app. If you read mail from Google through Outlook or Thunderbird, it will have lowest-common-denominator features through the lens of a different vendor's structure. Now you may consider it a superior advantage if the Gemini AI isn't available, but probably won't be able to create custom filters without the PWA.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoExtend Embrace Extinguish, Google's real motto.
- wintermutestwin 1y agoI’d love to ditch the multiple google mail accounts that I setup for nonprofits, but I worry that google is better at catching spam and fishing than the competitors. I use outlook for another, but MS is insanely unfriendly to newb users and their spam filters don’t work as well. Any suggestions?
- josefritzishere 1y agoMore trash jammed in my apps. It's just infuriating.
- orthecreedence 1y agoHi, it sounds like you're frustrated. Would you like our AI assistant to reach out to you with relevant tips and offers about your situation??
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoSource: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/05/gemini-summary-cards-gmail-app.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/05/gemini-summa...
- itishappy 1y agoHonest question: Anybody have a use-case for this in mind? I can't remember the last time I read an email for longer than about 5s and didn't fully care about the content. Business emails should already be formatted for efficiency, and I'm going to want to be sure I catch each point of the long-form ones. Maybe vacation updates from family?
- gherkinnn 1y agoMaybe you the user is not the target here. Maybe adding it to yet more things will make many important people at Google even more important and Sundar can babble on about AI first to the shareholders. It is hard not to assume just this with anything Google does.
- TZubiri 1y agoThis question but for every AI feature every company is going for. I'm not sure at all why, but there seems to be some economic incentive to push for AI features. Is it because it's a buzzword? Is it because selling GPU time gives good margins? Is it because the all knowing efficient market demands it? I don't know, but users don't want it.
- lukan 1y agoIt is because if you throw enough things at the wall, some hopefully will stick. I do see lots of potential AI to improve my workflows, but this ain't it. I am also very annoyed by google chromes dev tools recent new AI features. Don't need them, Don't want them - but I cannot get really rid of them. They are in the way. And they are in the way, so people use it, so some internal metrics make someone happy. Just not me.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoI can think of one - there's a bunch of newsletters/substacks I subscribe to that occasionally contain stuff I really care about somewhere in them, but are too long and dense to quickly skim them. An AI summary of most important points and topics would help me decide whether to invest time and read it in full, or archive it and forget. That's all theoretical anyway. I'm not on GMail; I technically have this feature in the e-mail client on my phone, but I never even use it. EDIT: The article mentions those summaries would apply to email threads too. I think that could be helpful. I've got tons of threads from some mailing lists that tend to grow large (10-20+ messages); catching up with them or revisiting old ones is tedious; an AI TL;DR of such threads actually sounds useful. Also I'd love for e-mail clients to have a feature reminding normies when they've "forgotten" to address some questions from the sender.
- tossandthrow 1y agoBe aware: in appropriate context this needs to be declared under the EU Ai act.
- cobertos 1y agoMigrated off of Gmail a few years ago and the gains of not having to worry about Google's direction keeps paying off. Go with a provider who's actually focused on email, you'll thank yourself.
- tossandthrow 1y agoI have a rather new experience with customer service: they don't understand my questions, and they don't appear to have read the questions. My theory is that a lot of companies are starting to use Ai to draft up responses. These Ais don't understand the question, but picks the closest in concept space, and assumes that question. It is horrible, because I need to all caps and explicitly ask customer service to read my messages, and I need to become incredibly rude to break out of it.
- ryandrake 1y agoThis has been kind of happening in Customer Service for at least a decade now, just not "with AI": You send them an E-mail with a specific and detailed question about your bill, and their inbox triage bot reads it, sees the word "bill" and responds back with a generic "Hi, thank you for contacting us about [BILLING]. Please find information about [YOUR BILL] at this URL: xxxxxxxx"
- chneu 1y agoThey're called canned responses. A lot of customer service reps are forced to use canned responses at level 1 no matter what. They can't respond with anything but a pre-made response.
- redavni 1y agoBeen using this in our Workplace account. Most people don't like it because they are luddites, but I absolutely love the summaries for those multi-week 50 email threads. Also the ability to quickly insert an absurdly overly formal response to a simple request as a joke is amusing. I do wish it had the ability to respond to emails for me though with a prompt.
- rurp 1y agoOh please, not everyone who disagrees with you is a luddite. If this feature is so great they should make it opt-in. People were clamoring to get early access to Gmail; if these summaries are as good as you assert then people will happily enable them. The fact that Google doesn't even provide an option to disable this one feature is telling. That strongly implies that Google managers agree with most of this thread and think this is more about juicing AI metrics than providing real value to users.
- redavni 1y ago[flagged]
- TZubiri 1y agoreturn openai.completions(SystemPrompt="Read the article posted, read my prompt, and redact a hacker news comment", UserPrompt="This is enshittification",Files="https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/05/the-gmail-app-will-now-create-ai-summaries-whether-you-want-them-or-not/ https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/05/the-gmail-app-will-no...")
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoThanks Google. I’d been looking for an excuse to migrate to Fastmail.
- butz 1y agoSomehow we ended up doing the opposite thing of compression (and I do not mean decompression): user writes three word email, AI expands it to several paragraphs of useless text, sends it to recipient. There another AI digests all that text to some other three words, loosing original meaning and not only wasting CPU on AI tasks, but wasting network bandwidth by sending a lot of useless data. I hate 21st century.
- imartin2k 1y agoPersonally I truly, deeply hate AI summaries and so I strongly disapprove of Google’s latest moves into this territory. I know it’s not a comment with substance, but I think the more people express their aversion to this trend, the higher the chances of it not becoming the norm.