Google announced last month at I/O 2024, its annual developers conference, that it would roll out the Gemini sidebar to Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides clients, including Google One AI Premium.
Side Panel (formerly Duet AI) is based on the excellent Gemini 1.5 Pro language model and offers you many advantages, including:
- Documentation: Writing and improving content, summarizing information, gathering ideas, and creating content from other documents.
- Slides: Create new slides, create custom images, and summarize your presentation.
- Spreadsheets: Track and organize data, quickly create tables, create formulas, and ask how to perform specific tasks in spreadsheets.
- Google Drive: Summarize one or more documents, get quick insights about a project, or dive deeper into a topic without having to navigate through multiple documents.
- Gmail: Summarize topics, suggest responses to topics, get help composing emails, ask questions, and find specific information in emails in your inbox or files in Google Drive.
The Gemini sidebar is available on the web and you can click the “Ask Gemini” button next to your account avatar in the top right corner to start help without having to switch tabs.
Google lists suggested queries on startup and automatically summarizes what you're working on.
This feature is combined with other built-in AI features such as Help Me Type.
Google introduced this feature to Workspace Alpha last May through Workspace Labs and Gemini.
In addition to the Gemini sidebar on the web, Gmail for Android and iOS now offers snippets for paying customers.
Previously, the main AI feature in Gmail for mobile was Type for Me.
Gmail now has a Gemini-based “Summary this email” button that appears below the subject line.
This button only appears in topics with more than two answers and you can rate the answers.