Gemini Side Panel Now Available in Google Docs, Drive, Slides and Gmail

Google is adding Gemini AI to several more places in its products and services. The company announced that the Gemini AI sidebar is now generally available in workspace apps like Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail.

Named after the NASA space program, the generative AI chatbot helps summarize, analyze, and generate content. Depending on the app, it can derive insights by analyzing emails, documents, and more. In other words, there’s no need to switch tabs in your browser or go back and forth between your documents and the Gemini website.

For example, Gemini in Google Docs can summarize long documents to quickly get to the main points, assist with brainstorming, and create content based on other files. AI can generate new slides in Google Slides, summarize presentations, create custom images, and more.

Similarly, the Gemini sidebar in Google Drive lets you summarize one or more documents and look up facts about a project. It can compose emails, suggest replies, and summarize email threads in Gmail.

“The side panel will use Google’s most capable models including the Gemini 1.5 Pro model with a longer context window and more advanced reasoning, allowing you to harness the power of Gemini directly from your most used Google Workspace apps,” Google said in a blog post.

To use Gemini in these apps, click Spark’s Ask Gemini button in the top-right corner, and a vertical bar will open. You’ll first see a set of suggestions. Or, you can type in the text field. In generating answers, the AI also suggests follow-up questions you can ask.

You can provide feedback on the response using the thumbs up icon and click the “eye” button to preview the chatbot’s response in the document. Here, the company warns against relying entirely on the chatbot’s answers, which is important considering that Google-developed AI sometimes makes the news for unexpected reasons.

Gemini will also be available to students in more than 100 countries as part of Google’s larger AI push, it said in a separate announcement. Recently, the AI chatbot Gemini added support for YouTube Music playback and its Android app was released in the UK and Europe.