If you feel a knot in your stomach every time you check your email inbox, we have good news for you. For some people, facing a pile of unread messages—especially ones that need to be answered—can sour any workday. In a world where technology connects us 24 hours a day, we can’t help but feel the constant pressure to respond as quickly as possible. However, this era of stressing out and drowning in a glass of water (i.e., spending half an hour reviewing an email to make sure it’s perfect) may be a thing of the past.
Last week, tech giant Google officially launched the integration of its artificial intelligence, Gemini 3, into Gmail. From now on, Google will no longer treat Gmail as a simple inbox, a digital repository where emails are stored, but will have an executive assistant that will help read, process, and manage them for you.
Free AI in your Gmail account
Until recently, the most powerful artificial intelligence features were reserved for paying customers. However, Google has decided to make some of its tools available for free to personal accounts in the United States. (It is expected to expand globally in the coming months.)
The first new feature is “Help Me Write,” a Gemini feature that helps you write the entire email. You just need to tell it what you want: a formal email, an informal email, a professional farewell, or simply need it to formalize or shorten a draft you’ve written yourself.
The second free tool offered by Gmail will be a godsend for those who have to constantly contact multiple departments. It’s called Thread Summaries. Gemini 3 simply reads email chains with 40 replies between different departments and creates a bulleted summary of the entire discussion. Instead of spending 20 minutes reading a tennis match between different departments, you’ll quickly know who said what and what conclusions were reached.
Finally, the suggested responses that used to be available have evolved. Buttons that impersonally said “Yes, thank you” or “Got it” are a thing of the past. From now on, if a friend invites you to dinner, artificial intelligence will suggest a complete response. Instead of typing “OK,” try something like “I’d love to! What time shall we meet? Should we go to the sushi place?”
Gmail’s paid features
If you already thought these new free options were good, you might be amazed by what you can do with a Google AI Premium or Ultra subscription. The crown jewel is Gmail Q&A. With it, your inbox becomes a smart personal search engine. Before, to search for information, you had to use keywords such as “invoice” or “November 2024” and open several emails until you found what you were looking for.
With Gmail Q&A, however, you can chat with your email as if it were a person. “Which contractors fixed up my garage ceiling?” The AI will search your old emails, identify the context of “plumbing,” and give you the name and contact information directly… without you having to open a single email.
Not only that, but it can also do calculations for you. If you ask it, “How much did I spend at Sephora last year, according to my bills?” Gemini will search for emails from orders sent from that store, extract the amounts from the attached PDFs, add them up, and give you the total.
Another feature that is only available if you have a paid subscription is their Proofreading. It’s far more advanced than the traditional spell checker. In fact, it competes with services like Grammarly; it doesn’t just look for typing errors, but analyzes the syntactic structure of sentences, evaluates the tone to see if it’s appropriate for the context, and alerts you if it sounds too aggressive or too passive. Overall, it helps improve clarity and writing style. If you have to write sensitive professional emails where every word counts, and you don’t have much experience, Gmail’s Proofread tool may be just what you need.