We recently went into detail about all the new goodies you’re about to get in your Gmail. Now, Google is turning the majority of them on for clients who turn on “Gemini Alpha” in their admin panels, and is rolling them out to everyone over the next few months.
Feature Recap: Gmail Features Available Now With Alpha
While there are quite a few new features coming, Google identifies these as the ones you’ll get right now if you turn on Gemini Alpha:
1) AI Overviews in Gmail
If you ask your inbox the status of a project or anything else, you’ll now get an AI overview which summarizes anything to do with your question. This is really handy for those email threads involving multiple stakeholders, deadlines, and dates and saves loads of time digging through emails to get the details right. However, since it is an AI Overview, you will want to fact check it before assigning any budgets or important client deadlines.
2) Data-driven “Help Me Write”
Now, if you ask Gemini to help you write an email about a particular subject, it will personalize it further by calling on your past chats, emails, and Drive files to put together your email for you. Again, you’ll want to fact-check it, but it takes much less time to fact check than to go on a hunt for the details you need for your response.
We’ll all have to wait a bit longer for better Suggested Replies, the AI Inbox, and proofreading, but the above two features are available now for anyone who wants to turn on Gemini Alpha.
How to Turn on Gemini Alpha
To turn on Gemini Alpha, follow the steps in this article. It is off by default for everyone at the moment. You will need to have one of the indicated Business or Enterprise Google Workspace plans for it to be available.
The linked chart also shows what other features you’ll get in Google Meet and Google Calendar based on your subscription level. Presumably, turning it on makes you first in line for any new features that Google wants to roll out to a limited audience, so there’s no real downside to doing it.
If desired, you can choose to limit it to certain organizational units you’ve designated in your Admin panel. However, there’s no clear business reason that anyone would want to do this, especially since it doesn’t affect your billing. The Gemini features cut down on work for everyone, and their presence doesn’t affect anyone’s workflow.
There are also no privacy concerns as the Alpha features are governed by the same data privacy measures already in place for your organization’s use of Google Workspace and Gemini. Your company data is still firewalled and only used to train your own individual user accounts in your organization.
If you need to upgrade to take advantage of these new features, or you want to migrate to Google Workspace to get the most AI-forward productivity suite, contact us today to get started.
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