Google continues to make efforts to help you compose and rewrite your emails using artificial intelligence – regardless of whether it is actually useful or not.
These features provided by Gemini are collectively known as “Help me write,” and together they act as an AI email assistant. Available since last August, “Help me write” lets you make a message more formal, add more details if you think it needs more elaboration, or shorten the draft if it seems too long.
Now Google is adding a new “Polish” option to the mix: The idea is to polish up whatever you’ve written, be it a fully-formulated email or a rough draft, into an email you can hopefully send with a clear conscience. It seems that “Polish”‘s default setting is to make the text seem more formal, so if you prefer a more casual tone, you may need to ask Gemini to rewrite the text for you again. (Or maybe write the email yourself?) This feature works in both the mobile versions of Gmail and the web.
Google is also updating the Help Me Write shortcut on iOS and Android. Now, when you write at least 12 words in your email draft, a new Refine My Draft option will appear on the screen. Swiping on it will reveal these AI rewriting features, including Polish, Formalize, Elaborate, Shorten, and Write a New Draft.
Credit: Google
These features, and Help Me Write in general, are not available to all Gmail users. To try them out, you’ll need to subscribe to Google One’s AI Premium plan, which comes with Gemini Advanced. Alternatively, you’ll see these options in Gmail if your school subscribes to the Gemini Education and Education Premium add-on, or your company subscribes to the Gemini Business and Enterprise add-on. The same goes for other Gemini features in Workspace, such as having Gemini appear in your sidebar.
While these features might entice some to pay extra for the company’s premium Google One plan, I don’t necessarily see the appeal. Sure, if you write a lot of emails, the work can get tedious. But are you really saving that much time by outsourcing the rewriting and editing to an AI? After typing a few notes, swiping through the options, and selecting “polish,” you probably could have written the email yourself. (And it wouldn’t sound like a bot wrote it, either.)
