If you need help refining or polishing an email, you may have some new options. Google has tweaked its Gemini AI writing tools so that it can now customize email drafts, the the company announced on Tuesday.
Google already had a Help Me Write feature for generative AI email creation, but the company has now tweaked it. You could choose from options like Formalize, Elaborate, and Shorten to customize your messages, and now there’s a Polish option for web and mobile that refines the message, even taking rough notes from a draft document and turning it into a formal message that you can review.
On mobile, the Help Me Write shortcut now appears in the body of your email. Select it to unlock access to the feature.
Read more: Gmail AI can now write emails for you on your phone: How it works
Once your draft has 12 or more words, you will see a shortcut to ‘Refine my draft’. You can then choose from the options to ‘Trim’, ‘Formalize’, ‘Expand’ or ‘Polish’.
These options are only available if you have Google Workspace with the Gemini Business and Enterprise add-on, the Gemini Education and Education Premium add-on, or Google One AI Premium. If you are one of these customers, the feature is enabled by default.
But be careful where you use AI capabilities: They might be fine for a work email, but more personal notes require a more personal touch. Google recently came under fire for a TV commercial it aired during the Paris Olympics, in which a father claimed his daughter was using AI to write a letter to her favorite Olympian. Many viewers rightly pointed out that it was a shameful idea to take the charm out of a child’s honest sentiments and give what could have been a touching letter to AI.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d call that a colossal parental failure,” CNET’s Connie Guglielmo writes in a commentary. “The reason we sometimes rave about the fan letters kids write to their heroes is that the kids produce such charming, honest — and imperfect — tributes in their heartfelt, handwritten letters and whimsical crayon drawings. Do we really want to encourage little kids to stop writing and drawing because it has to be ‘just right,’ which apparently only an AI can produce?”
Google told Guglielmo that while the ad was in testing phase before airing (the company declined to say with whom), negative feedback led the company to pull the ad from the Olympics.
Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is Google’s AI chatbot, launched in March 2023, and is intended to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Gemini and other AIs have been criticized for hallucinating or making things up, so users should be wary and not rely solely on their information. The Help Me Write AI feature became available in June 2023.
