Google Is Adding an 'AI Inbox' To Gmail That Summarizes Emails 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a user's messages and suggests they reschedule their dentist appointment, reply to a request from their child's sports coach, and pay an upcoming fee before the deadline. Also under the AI Inbox tab is a list of important topics worth browsing, nestled beneath the action items at the top. Each suggested to-do and topic links back to the original email for more context and for verification.
[...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.
[...] For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models. "We didn't just bolt AI onto Gmail," says Blake Barnes, who leads the project for Google. "We built a secure privacy architecture, specifically for this moment." He emphasizes that users can turn off Gmail's new AI tools if they don't want them. At the same time Google announced its AI Inbox, the company made free for all Gmail users multiple Gemini features that were previously available only to paying subscribers. This includes the Help Me Write tool, which generates emails from a user prompt, as well as AI Overviews for email threads, which essentially posts a TL;DR summary at the top of long message threads. Subscribers to Google's Ultra and Pro plans, which start at $20 a month, get two additional new features in their Gmail inbox. First, an AI proofreading tool that suggests more polished grammar and sentence structures. And second, an AI Overviews tool that can search your whole inbox and create relevant summaries on a topic, rather than just summarizing a single email thread.
Honestly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Honestly (Score:2)
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No shit. Nobody wants this.
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Well, I do.
When somebody sends me one of those really-long email chains, I do *not8 want to read it all to figure out what's happening. When somebody sends me a long-form article or video, I also don't want to spend the time reading or watching it. Being able to ask AI to summarize, is amazing.
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Ever notice how every damn company has some sort of summarization feature? Sure, I guess that’s what LLMs know best. Something about hammers and nails comes to mind.
Who cares?
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I think the expression you want involves hammers and thumbs!
The way the tech companies behave, it's more hammers and testicles. They're determined to smash us in the nuts with their AI hammer every chance they get. And they will not relent. "YOU WANT THIS!" seems to be the only thing they know how to say. And then they act mystified when people react poorly to having yet more of it shoved down our throats.
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I was thinking hammers and screws
Alternative email scheme (Score:5, Informative)
1. Get ProtonMail with ProtonPass
2. Create a unique email address for every online service to uniquely identify who spams you, sells or leaks your data.
3. Create a gmail account just for your phone.
4. Set up forwarding from Pass aliases to your phone gmail only for those services which you strictly need to use on your phone.
5. Live a happy, AI-free, private and undisturbed life on the go. Deal with life admin on a desktop in purposefully allocated time.
Re:Alternative email scheme (Score:5, Informative)
Another alternative that's a lot more work to set up, but much more flexible in the end, is to self-host your email. I've been doing that since about 2001.
My IMAP server is about 2m behind me (it's a Raspberry Pi 4 with two USB drives in RAID-1 configuration to hold the mail, etc.)
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Re: Alternative email scheme (Score:2)
What do you recommend doing about apps or websites which require a google/FB account to sign up?
Do you just skip those or have yet another disposable Google account?
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If they don't allow for a usual account, just don't use them. A have only seen few that don't have a fallback and they were not worth it.
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Another disposable.
Steady as she goes (Score:2)
Gmail already offers an AI summary at the top of a message when you open it.
It will also offer a translation, if the message is in a different language.
If I were Google I'd want to be careful about implementing solutions to existing problems, rather than adding solutions where no problems exist. I already get suggestions about paying bills when the bill will be paid automatically, and most of the "nudges" I see are not necessary...
Re:Steady as she goes (Score:4, Interesting)
The goal of all these suggestion/notification/alert shit isn't to help you. It's to help the engineers that designed it. They are very driven by metrics. They need to show x numbers of "impressions" in y amount of time. The more of them they blast in your face whether you want them or not, the better their metrics and the more likely they are to get promoted. The user experience no longer matters.
Re:Steady as she goes (Score:4, Insightful)
The goal of all these suggestion/notification/alert shit isn't to help you. It's to help the engineers that designed it. They are very driven by metrics. They need to show x numbers of "impressions" in y amount of time. The more of them they blast in your face whether you want them or not, the better their metrics and the more likely they are to get promoted. The user experience no longer matters.
In practice, in any organisation, including Google, there will be a tension between the commercial side of the business and the programmers (and others, who genuinely want to produce something good). I understand the pessimism I sense in your comment, but I think it would be more accurate to describe it as a pressure, rather than a done deal. Metrics are notoriously difficult to apply to software development, and despite the best efforts of management, smart developers will often reroute, subvert or ignore.
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I've extensively de-Googled my life [skoll.ca] as far as email/calendar/contacts go.
I've always used Android phones, but my next one will either be open-source Android, or not Android at all.
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Just a quick piece of info, as I had to settle on a brand for phones for myself and my family members, with these requirements and wishes: capability for banking apps of my banks, waterproof (IP67 or so), good or great camera, not Chinese made, if possible no Google, certainly no Meta. I settled on Samsung, happy to find that with stock ROM it's actually practically fully usable without a Google account. F-Droid and then Aurora Store does the j
Waste of compute time. (Score:2)
Genuine waste of space (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a role for AI in email (Score:3)
An AI that accurately categorized my incoming emails into "important", "worth reading", and "not worth reading" would be a welcome development. Gmail is currently one of my least-favorite tower-defense games.
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Except if you rely on it, it will get it wrong too often to be useful
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Now think about the amount of effort spammers put into getting around conventional spam filters. I think you can imagine the e-mails crafted to be marked as important and worth reading. As soon as you add a new incentive, you get a lot of people gaming it. You probably see soon gurus explaining how to phrase your e-mail such that it is summarized in a favorable way similar to the "SEO experts".
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Yep, and one that digests those long forward chains, or summarizes a long article, or summarizes a video somebody sends you, that's worth gold.
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I use a mail client and IMAP... (Score:2)
Gobs of data. (Score:2)
TFA mentions:
When you have a Gmail account that’s over a decade old, like I do, there are gobs of data sitting there, ready to be sifted through.
But is that really the case?
For example, I've had a GMail account for a *long* time, but have always used Thunderbird (and, I think, Eudora before that, with a different ISP) and have always downloaded all my mail to my local system - first using POP3 and now IMAP - and don't keep any messages on their servers. Sure, they could have scanned them when they arrived, but unless they're keeping all the deleted email, it's all gone now and new messages don't hang around long. I even clear out
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Agreed. I use Thunderbird with POP to my ISP with a 30-day retention on the server. I can check recent email through the web interface on vacation and still download the messages when I get home.
This does not allow me to use the mail account as a data repository while traveling but that is not what I use my email account for. I have important emails in Thunderbird going back to my college courses in 1998 that have outlived four email providers.
I would suggest installing Thunderbird to connect to a Gmail
Good for Dereks (Score:2)
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AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh.
I'm going to have to do it, aren't I?
I'm going to have to change all my forwarded domains to my own mailserver for webmail just so that I don't have shite like this running around in my email.
I have everything switched off, but there isn't going to be an option at some point.
I cannot express this enough: I do not want AI.
Google - trying to find a use for AI ... (Score:2)
Because they can't seem to find any more actual uses .. so no they are having to create them
First question (Score:2)
"For users who are concerned about their privacy" (Score:3)
For users who are concerned about their privacy, the information Google gleans by skimming through inboxes will not be used to improve the company's foundational AI models.
Was anyone concerned about their privacy using Gmail to begin with?
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Yeah this. If you want privacy, you need to be using ProtonMail or some such.
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Of course, all traffic gets routed through ECHELON and the newer equivalents, so there is no privacy anyways. Sure, TOR is encrypted and nobody can decrypt it but you... of course, your computer _has_ to have the key to decrypt it. Not to mention that no encryption system exists that the government _can't_ break (or doesn't already have a backdoor key to)... if they truly couldn't get past the encryption, then someone could use that encryption for planning an attack or something, or espionage.
If it's onli
AI Slop? (Score:1)
ok, so I asked the AI to have a look at this and asked the question, what if the original email was written by an AI (I hope you don't mind reading the AI output)
You’re describing Google/Gmail adding an AI layer that: reads all your emails, extracts “key topics,” infers obligations (“you should do X”), and presents a distilled action list.
That’s already risky. But the real problem appears when the input itself was AI-generated. The AI AI compression loop (this is the cor
who is reading summaries? (Score:2)
What am I going to do, read 50 summaries every day then read the emails for real when it is time to deal with them? For the rest of the emails I don't read, I usually go no further than the subject line. Sometimes I read the first sentence before I delete them. How is an AI possibly going to help me with a summary?
Good (Score:2)
Good, now I not only have to read the emails, but also their stupid summaries.
Tell me how (Score:2)
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"You'll have to wait until we implement this at midnight in a few months or so at some point in the future".