Writing emails can be a chore. Some people spend most of their working days corresponding back and forth with colleagues, clients, salespeople, and more. It can feel monotonous, having to churn out dozens of emails at a time. Feeling like you’re swimming in emails when you’ve only gotten through half of your day could mean you’re taking a chunk out of your personal time to catch up.
The most frustrating emails are ones you may have to write on your own. If you have to respond to someone else’s message, you might be able to get away with a “Sounds good” every once in a while. But creating your own email from scratch takes brainpower and time. Gmail has a feature that can help you with those, allowing you to burn through your to-do list a little faster each day.
Gmail is making these three useful features free for everyone
You’ll no longer have to pay to use certain AI features
Help me write brings Gmail and Gemini together
Google’s AI creates for you
It’s no secret that Google’s Gemini has become more and more prominent within Google’s suite of tools. You don’t have to use add-ons to get the most out of Gmail. Google Workspace is one of the ideal places to utilize Gemini, as it can help you navigate your tasks faster and suggest options for you to perfect and craft output. This ranges from planning projects to creating slides and writing emails.
If you’re stuck trying to come up with an email to someone, let Gemini give you a hand. When you’re in Gmail, you can click on Compose to write a new email. At the bottom of your email, there’s an icon with a pencil with a star on it. That’s Help me write, which populates a Gemini prompt bar in your email.
You can type in all kinds of prompts and Gemini will take what you’ve written and craft an email based on that. You won’t forget to respond to an email with this quick way of helping. This can range from responding to someone’s email with feedback to writing an email to your child’s principal saying they won’t be in that day. Gemini will help you write any kind of email based on prompts you give it.
The more detailed you are in your prompt, the more detailed the email will be. The first time you use Help me write, you may not get the results you’re looking for. As with any AI chat, it takes a bit of finessing to understand exactly what it can and can’t do for you.
Refine the email once Help me write creates it
You have the final say
Using Help me write can shorten your time spent coming up with emails because it will take any reasonable prompt and turn it into an email. In the photo above, I had it write an email to my mom telling her that I was looking into some recipes for Thanksgiving and wanted to provide her with some options for what I could bring.
I asked it to search the internet for recipes and include them. It typed out an email for me, one that was short and to the point. It listed the names of recipes but didn’t actually link to the recipes. This is a limitation of my prompt, so I’ll have to either refine it or just go find the links myself based on the titles it provided me for the recipes.
There are a few stages you go through when using Help me write. You can ask it to recreate the email if you don’t like anything that it has written. You can also click on the Refine button and Gemini can formalize, elaborate, or shorten the email. It will show you a draft based on your choice.
If you select one of them and click Insert, it puts it into your email. You can still edit it from there your own way or you can click the Help me write icon again at the bottom. Along with Formalize, Elaborate, Shorten, there is Polish. This takes in the entire email and can polish it. This is helpful if you only use Help me write for a portion of your email. You can also restart the process by clicking Help me write again.
Polish will rewrite your entire email and put it below the original version, so you can compare the two. If you like the new version better, you can click Replace at the bottom, which will delete the old version.
Incorporate your calendar into your emails
Help me write can look across Google Workspace
Google lets you combine tools to make them more powerful while you’re writing emails. You can enable your Gmail to work with your other Google Workspace tools like Chat, Meet, and Drive. It’s a great Google Workspace hack that you should toggle on.
By toggling on Google Workspace smart features in Settings in Gmail, you can have your apps working together. You also need to click on Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet above it.
This lets you consult your calendar when writing emails. You can tell Gemini when you’re using Help me write to propose a time based on your Google Calendar availability and it will look through your day and suggest times you are available. You will need to make sure that the calendar you want to be consulted on has its box checked so that the calendar shows up in your Google Calendar.
This adds a new immersive level to the Help me write feature, freeing you from having to open up a separate app, look at it, and decide what time you want to write in the email. Gmail can add a Google Meet invitation for specific times on your Google Calendar as well.
Gmail minimizes the stress of writing emails with Help me write
Using Help me write in Gmail gets Google Gemini to write emails for you based on your prompts. This can help you catch up on a backlog of emails and it can coordinate with your Google Calendar to help you find times to set up meetings. You can edit your prompts or have Gemini reshape and refine its output after you’ve seen it. It’s an easier way to write out emails from scratch.
