by lars_francke on 1/15/25, 2:15 PM with 459 comments
by the_snooze on 1/15/25, 2:53 PM
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
by sirsinsalot on 1/16/25, 12:38 AM
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
by seanvelasco on 1/15/25, 3:13 PM
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
by jakedata on 1/15/25, 8:56 PM
by grajaganDev on 1/15/25, 2:25 PM
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
by kotaKat on 1/15/25, 3:12 PM
by TuringNYC on 1/15/25, 10:16 PM
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
by jsheard on 1/15/25, 3:27 PM
by saaaaaam on 1/16/25, 11:48 AM
I asked Claude to do the same thing, it got every data point, and created a little react dashboard and a relatively detailed text summary.
I used exactly the same prompt with each.
by bcoates on 1/15/25, 3:41 PM
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
by mattkevan on 1/16/25, 10:34 AM
by 34679 on 1/15/25, 3:33 PM
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
by smithcoin on 1/15/25, 10:49 PM
by PittleyDunkin on 1/15/25, 3:01 PM
by jkaplowitz on 1/15/25, 10:07 PM
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
by dangoodmanUT on 1/15/25, 3:32 PM
by taeric on 1/15/25, 3:26 PM
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
by urbandw311er on 1/15/25, 8:58 PM
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
by nly on 1/16/25, 1:23 PM
Recently got a new phone and can't use Gemini with my old GSuite Legacy account.
No migration path back to personal @gmail.com accounts for my family.
When I moved from an @fastmail.fm email to my own domain years and years ago I just gave them money and added my domain to my account. No fuss.
Google are hopeless. They have all this consumer brand recognition and just squander it on garbage.
Google One + your own personal domain name would be great but presumably they're afraid it'll dismantle Workspace for small businesses.
by insane_dreamer on 1/16/25, 6:07 AM
The times that I had it try to find information in my gDrive folders it didn't find what I wanted, and I ended up using search as usual. It was also slower than me searching and looking through the docs.
by nomilk on 1/15/25, 11:48 PM
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
by wangii on 1/15/25, 9:57 PM
by adityapatadia on 1/15/25, 3:23 PM
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
by dsjoerg on 1/15/25, 8:54 PM
by Yawrehto on 1/16/25, 3:55 AM
I don't draw, not well, but I write, slightly better. I occasionally ask WordPress to have its AI generate a little blurb for me, and always wind up deleting it. It takes something I can't really describe, my voice I guess, and sucks it out. It homogenizes my writing to try to make it fit some bland ideal. I imagine to those more keen on art than I, AI art is similarly off.
And yes, stories are not the primary use of Gmail. But in business, words matter, and two seemingly synonymous words can be quite different, and two words that seem opposite may not be. I have a friend who teaches law, and they mentioned it was quite easy to tell which students cheated on one particular assignment discussing contracts. If I recall right, material contracts are a type of contract, and AI made up immaterial contracts.
While this mistake would hopefully be obvious, other mixups might not be, with potentially serious consequences.
by ritzaco on 1/16/25, 9:02 AM
That said, what you get from Google for a few dollars / month is so far over and above any other SaaS that I'm happy to keep paying (and paying more).
by paradite on 1/16/25, 1:19 AM
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
by atonse on 1/15/25, 3:10 PM
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
by est31 on 1/15/25, 11:46 PM
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
by paxys on 1/15/25, 10:10 PM
"Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the numbers?"
"Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
by bsenftner on 1/16/25, 11:45 AM
LLM AIs are forcing this issue to an apex, if and only if you and your peers realize this working with LLMs is also a communications issue, also one of framing information so both the correct information is delivered and a minimum of wrapping information that needs to be filtered through to understand is not delivered. The same reason you cannot explain to your boss, or coworker, or spouse some troublesome issue preventing a goal is also why you cannot get the quality replies you want from an LLM. You cannot express you request, your information effectively so the audience can understand what you meant.
by richbell on 1/15/25, 8:45 PM
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
by cloudking on 1/15/25, 4:30 PM
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
by yieldcrv on 1/15/25, 3:16 PM
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
by xeromal on 1/16/25, 2:58 PM
by KomoD on 1/15/25, 9:00 PM
by maxclark on 1/15/25, 11:00 PM
by aag on 1/16/25, 4:50 AM
Also, long ago, it was possible to set up an individual Gmail account with a non-gmail.com domain. Is that still possible?
by djhn on 1/15/25, 3:28 PM
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
by golem14 on 1/15/25, 6:34 PM
by renewiltord on 1/16/25, 4:01 AM
It's such an obvious use case and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can give me the answer if I paste the header and a value row but Gemini is utterly useless.
You're in-app. How is a textual copy-paste better in Claude? Useless Google PM. The Oracle Java of AI.
by rogerkirkness on 1/16/25, 4:14 AM
by Kapura on 1/15/25, 2:58 PM
by masto on 1/16/25, 1:45 PM
by parkersweb on 1/16/25, 9:45 AM
We’ve been happy customers of Workspace for around 16 years - this feels like the straw to break the camel’s back.
Strongly hoping there’ll be enough pushback from nervous corporates about data security that they’ll reconsider.
by myrandomcomment on 1/17/25, 6:17 AM
"oh god! now i have to type complete senten..... zzzzzzzz"
by sub7 on 1/16/25, 8:08 AM
I would buy $GOOG stock blindly but being a paid user of theirs blows
by xnx on 1/15/25, 10:04 PM
by jerrygoyal on 1/16/25, 4:53 AM
by Frederation on 1/19/25, 10:50 PM
by EspadaV9 on 1/15/25, 9:25 PM
by muhwalt on 1/16/25, 3:24 PM
This morning, I logged on to find that the AI features have been turned on domain-wide for us. I couldn't find any admin controls, so I opened up a support case. The off buttons are locked behind an enterprise subscription. Our end-users need to turn off smart features to disable Gemini. There's no domain-wide / admin level control unless you purchase their most expensive licenses. It's absolutely disgusting. I'm so disappointed with how this was rolled out. We should've been given an opportunity to make an informed and intentional decision about how or if we were going to use these features.
by everdrive on 1/16/25, 12:28 AM
by aucisson_masque on 1/15/25, 11:03 PM
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
by dansitu on 1/16/25, 10:39 AM
by dochtman on 1/15/25, 3:03 PM
(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
by tap-snap-or-nap on 1/16/25, 10:09 AM
by sergiotapia on 1/16/25, 4:59 AM
by josefritzishere on 1/16/25, 6:14 PM
by franczesko on 1/15/25, 9:00 PM
by germandiago on 1/16/25, 7:55 AM
by joejohnson on 1/16/25, 10:15 AM
by throwaway106382 on 1/15/25, 11:32 PM
by fijiaarone on 1/16/25, 5:24 PM
by xyst on 1/16/25, 3:25 AM
by more_corn on 1/17/25, 5:29 PM
by Animats on 1/15/25, 10:51 PM
Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
by moonlet on 1/16/25, 12:34 AM
by kyleee on 1/15/25, 9:40 PM
by Refusing23 on 1/16/25, 9:53 AM
so i dont wanna pay for it. especially not google, because.. well, im their product.
by registeredcorn on 1/16/25, 5:25 PM
Personally, I find that to be especially scummy because it essentially sounds like they are betting on people either not understanding that nuance, or not bothering to deal with it (and subsequently, not using AI, making that venture seem vaguely more profitable)
by HacklesRaised on 1/16/25, 2:10 PM
by mathw on 1/16/25, 8:12 AM
by dommer on 1/16/25, 6:28 PM
by 65 on 1/15/25, 4:03 PM
Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?
by varispeed on 1/16/25, 2:10 PM
This is getting tiresome.