One non-negotiable for all digital workers is a great hotspot. A close second? Streamlined productivity. Artificial intelligence tools are becoming better suited for the challenge and to actually be integrated into your workday. Google Workspace is one of those.
Google welcomed Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, to the digital world on Dec. 6, 2023, around eight months after OpenAI’s GPT-4 launch. While the name doesn’t coincide with its launch date (the tool went by a different name, Bard, originally), Gemini was named after the astrological symbol’s dual-natured personality — the ability to adapt quickly and connect to a wide range of people, all while seeing things from multiple perspectives. Gemini got its new name «because we wanted to bring teams working on language modeling closer together,» said Jeff Dean, Gemini’s co-technical lead.
I was able to access Gemini free for 14 days since I have a business domain through Google Workspace. I was given 30% off the monthly price for three months ($16.80) following my free trial. Then my monthly bill went up to $24.
In those short two weeks, I had the opportunity to navigate its «Help me write» prompt to suggest texts based on what I inserted into the text screen. This can include drafts for a blog post, help writing song lyrics and rewriting original text to edit for tone or to be concise.
What is AI summarization?
If you’ve got a long to-do list, the last thing you’ve got time for is to read a super long document. This is where AI summaries can help: AI tools can quickly scan everything from a document or a web page to a spreadsheet, and create concise notes on the main points. Think of it as a «too long, didn’t read» summary made of any document you need to know the gist of.
For now, we’re focusing on summarizing Google Docs, but you can also use Gemini to summarize other files from Google Drive and emails from Gmail.
How to use AI to summarize a Google Doc
Step 1: Open a document on Google Docs and highlight to select the text you would like Gemini to help you summarize.
Step 2: Click Help me write to the right of the selected text, and choose what you’d like to implement from the drop-down menu — in addition to Summarize, options include Tone, Bulletize, Elaborate, Shorten, Rephrase or Custom (write your own prompt).
Step 3: Click Summarize and see what Gemini comes back with, making sure to double-check that it understood your document and what was important (and ensure the AI tool didn’t hallucinate).
Step 4: An interesting addition to Google Docs is the ability to provide feedback on the generated text. After creating your summary, you cannote whether Gemini has provided a good or bad suggestion, edit the prompt to update and regenerate text or create a new version of previously written text and click retry.
You can also provide general feedback on this feature by navigating to Help > Help Docs improve. If necessary, you can also report a legal concern.
To turn off the «Help me write» AI-powered prompt, you must exit Workspace Labs. If you exit, «you will permanently lose access to all Workspace Labs features, and you won’t be able to rejoin Workspace Labs.» You can learn more about how to exit Workplace Labs here.
Should you use Gemini AI?
Gemini calls its AI writing tool «a useful and interesting resource» if you like finding patterns and connections. I agree. I decided to implement Google Workspace Gemini because of a desire to expedite and streamline writing processes. But I also decided to purchase a monthly Gemini membership because of how seamlessly it integrated with all the other Google products I regularly use.
In my digital toolbox, this AI addition truly does help me navigate the most efficient pathway to writing emails and documents.
Just make sure you apply the usual AI caveat of double-checking that the tool came back with accurate information before acting on anything, just in case it hallucinated or drew the wrong conclusions.
You can check out the Gemini-powered summary of a human-written article at the bottom of this article to see how accurate this AI tool can be.
What other AI tools can summarize text?
There are many other choices if you need to summarize text and you’re not a Google Docs or Gmail person. You can use other AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek. Just prompt the chatbot with a request to summarize something for you, then either copy and paste your document or attach a PDF file.
There are also tools specifically made for summarizing text, like Summarizer and QuillBot.