If you need help refining or polishing an email, you might have some new options. Google has tweaked its Gemini artificial intelligence writing tools so it can now adjust email drafts, the company announced on Tuesday.
Google already had a Help Me Write feature for generative AI email creation, but the company has now adjusted it. You could choose from options like Formalize, Elaborate and Shorten to tweak your messages, and now there’s also a Polish option for web and mobile that refines the message, even taking rough notes from a draft document and turning them into a formal message for you to review.
On mobile, the Help Me Write shortcut will now appear 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 12 or more words are in your draft, you should see the Refine My Draft shortcut, and then you can choose from the Shorten, Formalize, Elaborate or Polish options.
These options are available only if you’ve got 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’re one of those customers, the feature is turned on by default.
But watch where you’re using the AI abilities: they may be fine for a business email, but more personal notes require a more personal touch. Google was recently called out for a TV commercial it ran during the Paris Olympics in which a dad claimed his daughter used AI to write a note to her favorite Olympic athlete. Many viewers rightly pointed out that taking the charm out of a kid’s honest feelings and handing what could have been a touching letter over to AI was a cringeworthy idea.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d call that a massive parental fail,” writes CNET’s Connie Guglielmo in a commentary. “The whole reason we sometimes gush over fan letters written by kids to their heroes is that the kids produce such charming, honest — and imperfect — homages in their heartfelt, handwritten letters and quaint crayon drawings. Do we really want to encourage little kids to stop writing and drawing on their own because it has to be ‘just right,’ which apparently only an AI can produce?”
Google told Guglielmo that while the ad tested well before airing — though it didn’t say with who — the negative feedback led the company to pull it from its Olympics rotation.
Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is Google’s AI chatbot, launched in March 2023, is meant to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Gemini and other AIs have been called out for hallucinating, or making things up, so users need to be on guard and not simply rely upon their information. The Help Me Write AI feature became available in June 2023.
