Gemini will yada yada your Google Chat into a neat summary

(Image credit: Google)

Step away from your computer or phone for a few minutes, and you might return to an avalanche of notifications about new messages. If you're using Google Chat, you won't have to comb through them all to find out what you missed anymore, thanks to Google's Gemini AI assistant. You can pull up Gemini from the Google Chat sidebar and ask the AI to summarize the conversation and dig into the most important bits.

The new feature expands Gemini's presence from other Google Workspace applications like Docs and Drive into Google Chat. If you click on the "Ask Gemini" icon at the top of the Google Chat interface, a chat window for the AI will appear where you can ask about what's been said in group chats, direct messages, and spaces.

If you ask the AI to "catch me up," you'll get a complete conversation summary, which you can ask for in bullet points. If it's too short, you can request a longer summary too. You can also ask for more specific details, like any requests for help, key takeaways, or other decisions made in the thread. You can even ask about other people's tasks or what a person said about specific topics. The demo below shows how it works.

Gemini Chat

Gemini can't sort through your entire conversational history, just the current view. It also is restricted to Google Chat. That means no emails or files in Google Drive, despite Gemini having a presence and access to those applications in other circumstances. Google claims this is deliberate as it maintains focus on the current chat in context without pulling in irrelevant information. Plus, tightly constraining data sources reduce the risk of Gemini hallucinating. You also won't be able to pull up Gemini in Google Chat without a subscription to Gemini Business, Enterprise, Education, or Education Premium.

Even with those (likely temporary) limits to availability, bringing Gemini to Google Chat fits with how Google is working to embed Gemini across all of its platforms and services. That includes Gemini Extensions to take up Google Assistant's role with Google Messages, Maps, and pretty much everything Android does.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.