Forget old-fashioned Gmail, Docs and Sheets: Google transforms its entire suite with Gemini in French

Every morning, when they arrive at the office, some employees undoubtedly have visions of horror. A “73 unread emails” is never fun and, in some cases, can take up a colossal amount of time. You must first isolate important messages, then catch up with group conversations and respond when necessary. Time sometimes wasted on useless tasks, but which is essential.

With the new version of Gmail for professionals, Google is trying to address this problem. After several months of testing in the United States, which saw 100,000 companies adopt generative AI, the web giant is launching “Gemini for Google Workspace” on November 21 in France and other countries (French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are on the program). On the program: a chatbot accessible in its professional tools, which is capable of helping you in your work.

What about the general public? Rest assured, he is also eligible for the new features of the Google suite.

Gemini side panel will transform Google services

Let’s take the example of our employees overwhelmed by emails. With the Gemini side panel, which takes the form of a conversation on the right of the screen, their daily lives could well be turned upside down.

Arriving in the morning, an employee might take the reflex to write to Gemini “Isolate my important emails”. Gemini would then read the contents of the 73 pending emails and would only keep the most important ones — for him. Then he could ask her “give me a summary of the conversation with the team”. Gemini would then analyze a conversation and indicate what each speaker is saying. Then he might add “what is expected of me?” ”, then ask “generate me a draft response to say I’m up for the 2 p.m. meeting”. Everything would be automated, without the need to read all of the emails.

Other examples put forward by Google: generating text in Google Docs from notes. Just ask the Gemini side menu to go read your emails, then write a plan for a future document. The strength of Gemini for Workplace is that it has access to all files stored in a collaborator's Google Drive, which therefore does not make it a generic chatbot like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Responses are tailored to real-world activity, and Google says account data is not used to train its AI. Gemini can also correct the spelling and grammar of a text, or consult the calendar to indicate possible incompatibilities.

Today, Google's artificial intelligence can create text documents and spreadsheets. It will soon be able to create presentations, generate images and summarize Google Meet conferences, functions exclusive to English for the moment.

Google will also allow companies to create what it calls “Gems” (its competitor to OpenAI’s GPTs). These are micro-conversations that can be shared with all employees in a group to ask specific questions on a subject. An “HR” Gem could answer questions about salary and leave, a “regulations” Gem could indicate the office policy on animals, a “planning” Gem could manage the availability of a team… Each company can thus create its own chatbots trained to answer specific questions.

To access Gemini for Workplace, businesses will have to pay more.

In addition to the usual Workplace subscription, which allows a company to equip its employees with storage space and Google collaborative tools, the IA subscription requires an additional 20 euros per month per user in the Business version. (with 1,000 requests per month) and 30 euros per month in Enterprise version, with all functions in preview. Companies can request free trials or equip only a portion of their employees in order to assess the impact on their business.

Gemini is also coming to Gmail and the general public's Google Suite, but you have to pay

Why charge for Gemini integration into Google services?

Questioned by Numerama, the company acknowledges that such a service costs a lot of money (generative AI consumes resources) and that it could not deploy it more widely today. Google hopes to succeed in lowering costs in the future to deploy it everywhere, but it will have to wait a few more months.

It is also a way for the web giant to offer a more expensive subscription, with the promise of saving time for businesses. According to its studies, employees with Gemini would save 105 minutes per week thanks to the system, while more and more companies would like “join the AI ​​train”.

In the meantime, it is possible to test the Gemini side panel without being a company.

Google is adding the new feature to its Google One AI Premium subscription, at 22 euros per month, which provides access to the latest Gemini Advanced models and 2 TB of storage. Subscribers to the service have access to the same functions as pro customers, pending wider deployment in the future. It is likely that, by the next Google I/O in May 2025, the web giant will make its service usable by a larger number of users. The Gemini chatbot is already free.