PAIN AND GAIN

Al has arrived in Gmail. Here’s what to know

- BRIAN X. CHEN

About two years ago, Google practically force-fed artificial intelligence to the masses when it began showing Al-generated responses to people’s questions at the top of search results.

Now the company is taking a similar tack by adding Al into another ubiquitously used service, Google Mail.

Google this month began rolling out a suite of new tools relying on generative Al, the technology driving chatbots, to help users manage their bloated inboxes and speed up the process of writing email. Some of the features are free, while others require paying a subscription.

Gmail users can now look up emails by typing a question, such as: “What's the name of the job recruiter I met last month?”

Google is also testing a new type of inbox, set for release later this year, that automatically pulls together a to-do list based on tasks discussed inside emails. In addition, Google unveiled tools to streamline writing, including an automatic proofreader and response generator.

If the new AI technology becomes widely adopted by Gmail users, this could be the biggest change to email, our most steadfast web service, in decades. It may transform the way people manually check their inboxes all day long into a more streamlined experience, an overview that people look at periodically.

All of this, of course, has implications for privacy.

To make the new features work, Gemini, Google's Al assistant, needs access to a user's entire inbox. The company insists that while Gemini systems analyse our emails, there are protections in place so that its employees do not read them.

To understand what this means for us, I interviewed a Google executive overseeing Gmail as well as privacy experts.

And to assess whether the tools are worth the potential trade-off in privacy, I tested Google's Al-ified Gmail for the last week.