Gemini can now schedule meetings for you within Gmail
Gmail has a new option, namely to let people cancel meetings with you. It’s called Help Me Schedule and it lets you create a meeting widget that understands the context of your message. It can sometimes be quite a hassle to organize a meeting and this should make it easier.
Gemini in Gmail
Gemini understands that you indicate in your message that you want to set up a meeting and will then come up with different times that the person you are sending the email to can then choose to put the appointment in your calendar. It saves a lot of emails back and forth, besides the fact that it is nice that Gemini understands what you say and takes action on it.
Something like this already exists in Google’s Pixel 10 phones, but it is not yet available in some countries. It is called Magic Cue and can retrieve information from different apps. If you call an airline’s customer service, for example, they will automatically retrieve your flight details.
AI as a real assistant
In this way, AI really becomes an assistant, and that is a big plus. At the same time, you must open your apps to the AI to use this. But it’s all within Google, so it’s based on things the tech company already knows about you. However, getting used to suddenly having such a helpful assistant does take some.
Help Me Schedule
Back to Gemini in Gmail: when it notices that you are proposing a meeting, the email will display a Help Me Schedule button in the bar with tools for your email. The AI will then suggest certain times based on your message. If you say: Let’s take a measurement in two weeks, he will not come up with tomorrow’s date. He will also look at your agenda to see if you have time and if so, when.
The widget will then appear in your email and the recipient can click on a time and the meeting will be scheduled. However, this is initially only possible for one-on-one meetings, so it is not immediately possible with groups. That’s a shame, because group meetings are the most significant challenge: piecing together all those agendas is sometimes tricky. At the same time, you can of course see what someone’s availability is for years, as long as you work in the same company and have authorisation to do so. But especially if you want to meet people from outside, there are not enough options within Office-like programs to get it done really quickly.
Easier to schedule meetings
AI can help with this, although it will encounter restrictions related to privacy and authorisations. In any case, Google has now taken the first step by asking AI for help. You may not have the feature yet: it will appear for most people in late October or early November. However, it is only available for business users of Google’s Workspace, and for casual users who have Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra, Google’s paid subscriptions with all kinds of AI capabilities.