During a preview ahead of the conference, Gmail product lead Devanshi Bhandari demonstrated the system answering questions about travel plans, school events, hotel reservations, and appointments directly from inbox content. Users can ask follow-up questions, shift topics mid-conversation, and retrieve specific details like hotel room numbers or flight information through natural speech.
“Gmail Live can answer naturally phrased questions, respond to follow-up questions, and pivot if you need to interrupt it,” Bhandari said.
Google said the feature can also distinguish between related topics, infer context from previous conversations, and identify people or events even when they are not explicitly named in a query.
The company is positioning Gmail Live as an additional layer on top of Gmail’s existing search tools rather than a replacement for traditional inbox search. Users will still be able to search emails manually through keywords, sender names, and domains.
The rollout comes as Google continues pushing Gemini deeper into consumer products, using AI features tied to everyday tasks as a way to demonstrate practical applications for the technology. Gmail Live focuses on one of the more common frustrations inside email: locating information scattered across long message histories and overlapping conversations.
Google is also adding several other AI-driven inbox features, including ready-to-send drafts, faster access to files, and new task management tools that allow users to mark individual to-dos as completed directly from Gmail.
The company additionally said its broader AI Inbox experience — which summarizes important items and tasks from a user’s inbox — is expanding beyond Google AI Ultra subscribers to include Google AI Pro and Plus subscribers.
Gmail Live itself will launch later this summer and will initially be limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers.
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Images courtesy of Google.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
