Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
- Reference: 0180661520
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/26/2230202/gemini-in-google-calendar-now-helps-you-find-the-best-meeting-time-for-all-attendees
- Source link:
> According to a recent post on the [2]Workspace Updates blog , Gemini in Google Calendar can now help you quickly identify optimal meeting times when creating an event, as long as you have access to the attendees' calendars. The new "Suggested times" feature scans everyone's calendars and highlights the best time slots based on availability, working hours, and potential conflicts, eliminating the need to manually check schedules. Google has also made rescheduling simpler. The company explains that if multiple attendees decline your invite, you'll see a banner in the event showing a time when everyone is available, letting you update the invite with a single click.
The feature is being rolled out starting today to eligible Workspace tiers. It will be enabled by default and is expected to reach all eligible users over the next few weeks.
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/gemini-in-google-calendar-now-helps-you-find-the-best-meeting-time-for-all-attendees/
[2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/01/improved-meeting-suggestions-gemini-calendar.html
Nothing new? (Score:4, Informative)
Hasn't Exchange offered this for decades? Wasn't that one of the main "benefits" of locking yourself into the MS ecosystem?
Re: (Score:3)
> Hasn't Exchange offered this for decades? Wasn't that one of the main "benefits" of locking yourself into the MS ecosystem?
Next up: email address auto-completion powered by Gemini!
Sneaky! (Score:2)
Sneaky! What this does is now everybody's boss makes their employees use Google calendar!
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, yeah? If your company uses Google for email, calendar, etc., then your boss can force you to use Google calendar.
Where have I seen this before? (Score:2)
Ah, yes. Windows Outlook had something like this more than a decade ago. I haven't worked in a Windows shop since around 2010 and you didn't have to manually look up individual participant's calendars to schedule meetings. (Though, IIRC, some managers chose to restrict access to their calendars.)
Congratulations, Google, on reinventing the wheel.
Timely (Score:4, Interesting)
[1]A vulnerability in Google’s AI assistant Gemini allowed attackers to leak a victim’s private meetings via Google Calendar events, cybersecurity firm Miggo reports. [securityweek.com]
Letting AI agents have access to your data is going to be a whole new level of security nightmare that will make today's malware seem quaint.
[1] https://www.securityweek.com/weaponized-invite-enabled-calendar-data-theft-via-google-gemini/?is=bbaafe540064a2e0ec1224f395b4c190af3a5d6311114caafa638299252606bb
Why? (Score:3)
This is a trivial algorithmic problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. How is this "AI"?
Re: (Score:3)
They are getting desperate and hope nobody notices. To be fair, most people will not.
Re: (Score:2)
Google doesn't strike me as a company that is in a state of desperation. My guess? They weren't offering this service, decided to enable it with Gemini, and then Digital Trends were the desperate ones who made a story out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't comment on whether it is 'desperation' or not; but this seems very much in line with how they handle the "smart features" toggle in 'workspace'/gmail. There is just the one(merrily enabled by default in the US; not in the EU) and it gates both things that fairly obviously involve their bot like "Smart Compose is personalized to your writing style" and ones that we somehow managed to implement a zillion years ago by banging floppy disks together in the dirt "spelling"; along with ones that pre-'AI' g
Google Knows Best (Score:3)
They know where you are. They know where you've been. They know what you bought. They know what you're doing. They know what you're wearing. They know what you're watching. They know what you're browsing. They know what you wrote. They know what you deleted. Google knows best because they know everything about you.
Gemini? (Score:2)
Finding an available slot where all invitees are free is not a hard problem to solve and certainly not one that an AI is required. Although it does point to a problem of trusting Google in the first place to plan meetings this way . Maybe its time to bring this sort of thing back in-house.
Re: (Score:2)
Mathematically it is not hard. If the number of attendees exceeds about five, it can become almost impossible, but AI is not going to help that. Just remember to block of time for lunch on your calendar or you will find yourself in lunch time meetings (without food because companies are cheap).
Re: (Score:3)
> Mathematically it is not hard. If the number of attendees exceeds about five, it can become almost impossible, but AI is not going to help that.
The problem is O(M*N) where M is the number of attendees and N is the number of days you want to check for availability. You just examine everyone's availability with some granularity (e.g., hour-by-hour) for a certain interval of days or weeks. You'll find all of the time-periods where everyone is free quite easily. So, it's nowhere near impossible to search for available time-slots, but there's no guarantee you'll find any.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. That is why it is important to block off things like lunch on your calendar. Otherwise, that is the most likely time for everyone to be available.
Best meeting slots :o (Score:2)
I don't know how any major business ever got anything done without lots of meetings.
No meeting is better (Score:2)
The best meeting is no meeting, and Gemini should refuse to schedule dumb-ass meetings (now that would be an AI service I could actually embrace).
Can AI be my meeting stand-in? (Score:2)
Text me if I need to make a decision and just give me a synopsis.
Could be useful (Score:2)
I see comments about "what's the point, Gmail or Exchange already do this." I agree if you're looking at it in a rigid free/busy context.
Where AI could help is making fuzzier suggestions especially if I could make my blocked times more contextual. For example there are standing meetings that I will attend if I'm free like a monthly Java knowledge sharing session. There is the Maybe option, but doesn't seem to help with finding time to meet with others.
If I could rank/classify meetings, that might help and A
AI! (Score:2)
Any word on whether the implementation is actually invasive, unreliable, and unbelievably computationally expensive; or is a desperately classical feature that's probably older than I am being artificially tied to a totally unrelated set of antifeatures to help goose adoption numbers?
Perfect for? (Score:2)
I don't enter everything I do into Google Calendar. Who does? Everybody who needs to be in a meeting? I don't think so. Most people don't even use it. So this will be good in a company where everybody is required to use their Google Calendar 100%? Sound like a terrible place to work.
Re:Perfect for? (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? Use Google email/calendar/etc at work.
I will also note that this article is BS, because we can already see others calendars that are in our environment and select a time. We have been able to do this for at least 10 years.
Re: Perfect for? (Score:2)
Yeah but this is with AI Luddite!
Re: (Score:2)
"we can already see others calendars that are in our environment and select a time."
-1, assumes all participants have overlapping free time during business hours.
People with actual decision to get made need to figure out which other meetings they can reasonably claim priority over and who could be convinced to wake up at 6 am.