Gmail’s smart replies will use AI to pull context from your inbox and Drive

Gmail’s smart replies, which suggest potential replies to your emails, will be able to pull information from your Gmail inbox and from your Google Drive and better match your tone and style, all with help from Gemini, the company announced at I/O. 

The improvements build on Google’s “contextual” upgrade to smart replies it introduced last year. That change allowed responses to be longer than before, meaning smart replies could be more than a short “Sounds good!” But they could still only bring in information from the Gmail thread you were in. With the changes announced today, smart replies will theoretically be able to include a lot more context than before.

The idea is that “Gemini can understand the situation that you need to respond to” and take over the task of “digging through all the other files” and rereading long threads to make sure the response has all the right information, Google Workspace’s VP of product, Blake Barnes, tells The Verge.

Smart replies can also now account for tone and style based on the person you’re talking to, meaning it might suggest more formal replies if you’re emailing your manager or more casual ones if you’re going back and forth with a friend.

“We’re moving from a place where AI is broadly helpful to AI that’s helpful for you,” Barnes says. 

There’s the chance that a lot of people end up using this: Barnes declined to share a specific figure of how many people use smart replies, but says that “there are plenty of people that do.” But as with all AI-generated text, you’ll want to double-check that it didn’t hallucinate anything before you actually hit send. It would look pretty embarrassing if the smart replies mess up an important fact in an email you send to your boss, after all.

The smart replies will be available in English at first, on the web, iOS, and Android and will launch in alpha in Google Labs in July. The feature is expected to become generally available in Q3 of this year. You’ll have to pay for these fancier smart replies, though, as they’ll launch as part of paid Workspace plans and as part of Google One AI Premium. Over time, it’s “possible” the feature could come to free Workspace users, Barnes says.

At I/O, Google announced some other features for Gmail, too. Gemini will be able to help you manage your inbox, like by asking the AI assistant to delete unread emails from a certain sender with a feature it calls “inbox cleanup.” The tool will be generally available in the third quarter. When you’re trying to book a meeting with somebody, Gmail will also use Gemini to show a prompt to suggest proposing times from your calendar. This feature will also be generally available in Q3.

Google also announced other features coming to Workspace products, including speech translation in Google Meet, AI avatars in Google Vids, and the ability for Gemini to just pull information from linked documents in a Google Doc when offering writing assistance.