News: 0177868105

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Gmail's AI Summaries Now Appear Automatically (theverge.com)

(Friday May 30, 2025 @11:25AM (msmash) from the how-about-that dept.)


Google has begun [1]automatically generating AI-powered email summaries for Gmail Workspace users, eliminating the need to manually trigger the feature that has been available since last year. The company's Gemini AI will now independently determine when longer email threads or messages with multiple replies would benefit from summarization, displaying these summaries above the email content itself. The automatic summaries currently appear only on mobile devices for English-language emails and may take up to two weeks to roll out to individual accounts, with Google providing no timeline for desktop expansion or availability to non-Workspace Gmail users.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/676933/gmail-ai-summaries-workspace-android-ios



Ick. (Score:2)

by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 )

Do not want.

So much for effective communication, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

by gillbates ( 106458 )

So instead of teaching people to write concise, to-the-point emails, we instead let them ramble on and use AI to communicate what they really intended to say.

This doesn't solve the TLDR problem, it only makes it worse by encouraging people to waste time writing emails that others simply won't read.

Re: (Score:1)

by cybotron3000 ( 7241838 )

Your comment reminded me of a phrase from the essay Politics and The English Language by George Orwell:

prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Re: (Score:1)

by cybotron3000 ( 7241838 )

[1]https://www.orwellfoundation.c... [orwellfoundation.com]

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

whew! (Score:2)

by argStyopa ( 232550 )

"saved me the trouble enabling the feature".

Aside from the word 'the', you could pretty much put ironic quotes around every word individually in that quoted sentence.

I'm sure glad google is thinking about me and my workload.

Sucks (Score:2)

by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 )

The summaries are terrible, they leave out important info.

Re: (Score:2)

by Touvan ( 868256 )

Came here to say that. If you want to misunderstand everything sent to you, just read the summary!

I'm glad I don't use gmail...

Re: Sucks (Score:1)

by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 )

Web search too. Mostly takes up screen space telling me something I already know. Occasionally wrong. Often irrelevant. Never has the detailed information I actually searched for.

Fucking waste.

Re: (Score:2)

by Opyros ( 1153335 )

So they'd be perfect for Slashdot?

MS's mantra (Score:3)

by grasshoppa ( 657393 )

Features so good they have to force people to use them.

Doesn't it seem as though the past 10+ years of software development has seen just about everything get worse?

@gmail.com is the new @aol.com (Score:1)

by FlipperPA ( 456193 )

I tried to switch to DuckDuckGo from Google search several times since 2012 or so. Initially, it didn't take. But on the third or fourth try, it did: I've now been a DDG user for three full years, rarely using Google search except as a rare fallback. This isn't so much because DDG got incredibly better; it is more because Google search got incredibly worse.

The switch to ProtonMail was even easier. I switched to ProtonMail to Gmail in 2012, and never looked back. It is just better. In addition to the privacy

Can't disable either (Score:2)

by RevRagnarok ( 583910 )

I can't disable it, especially on my phone. Very annoying knowing I'm contributing to the climate disaster without even trying. I got rid of some of the buttons with uBlock Origin previously...

"You can ask it anything!" "Ask it to fuck off!"

That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows
returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball.
-- Bill Veeck