Google recently revealed that it’s extending the Gemini side panel to Google Chat to enhance how users work together in their spaces, groups, and DMs. Some of the tasks that Gemini can help its users with are summarization, analysis, and generation from insights gathered from a user’s email, doc, and so on.
With Gemini in the side panel of Google Chat, users can perform several tasks to enhance team communication, including:
- Summarizing conversations: Voiceover prompts Gemini to create a summary or an extended summary of any given conversation.
- Identifying action items: There is an inbuilt capability which when activated by the command, ‘What are the action items in this conversation?’ will generate the list of tasks or responsibilities for the user from the current conversation.
- Answering specific queries: Gemini can also assist request specifics within the conversations such as: “What did [person] say about the project deadline?” or “What is the decision regarding the new product rollout?
This feature is meant to directly touch the end users and help them via collaboration while keeping them posted in environments where communication can be fast and frequent in Google chat. The sidebar contains all the options and services you might need, the “Catch me up” option helps to summarise the conversation and to save time on the read all the messages. You can also create a list of tasks from that space or discussion and pose the questions.
The company also points out that, through the generative AI chatbot it is possible to dissect and derive key points from the messages in the Google chat conversation you are viewing currently. However, Gemini will not summarize the analysis or context, for the whole episode of Chat, nor all the files you may have in Drive, or all your emails in your Gmail inbox.
Also, the small possibility of giving fast answers to questions within a chat can be useful in cases when actual concentration on meetings or discus is made, where, for instance, the phone rings and the person can forget about certain decisions or tasks.