Gmail Will Automatically Summarize Your Emails Using Gemini AI (but You Can Turn This Feature Off)
Ever since Google began integrating Gemini AI into all of its apps, users have been complaining about seeing an optional AI-powered Summarize button in their Gmail threads. Now, Google is so confident in the feature that it’s enabling automatic summaries for all paid Google Workspace accounts with Gemini access. Now, when you open a long email or thread, the AI summary will be the first thing you see, right at the top.
Personally, I find these summaries to be quite handy, depending on the email. But even though Google says these automatic summaries won’t appear in every email, only in ones where the AI thinks they’re useful, I can still find them annoying if they start popping up too often. In that case, you might want to turn them off. Luckily, you can, but that also means disabling Gemini in Gmail entirely.
Google’s New Automatic Email Summary Cards
According to Google’s announcement , new automated AI summary cards will appear on top of certain emails for paid Workspace users, but only on mobile devices (both iPhone and Android) for now. Again, you won’t see a summary for every email, like delivery orders or random promotions. But if Google detects that your email is particularly long or has a lot of replies, then a summary card may be triggered. These summary cards will be dynamic and will change as new replies come in. Google ensures that all the key points from your email thread will also be reflected in the summary card. And in case a long email doesn’t get summarized for you, you can still use the “Summarize this email” button to manually trigger an AI review.
This feature is currently only available in English and will be gradually rolled out globally over the next two weeks. You should start seeing it on the web later.
While Gemini has come a long way, it’s important to note that it’s still based on the Big Language Model, and is therefore vulnerable to hallucinations. While the AI Summary card can be helpful, you should still manually check your email to make sure you haven’t missed anything important.
How to Disable Gemini Dashboards in Gmail
If you’re a paid Workspace with Gemini user and don’t want to see automated summaries in your emails, your only option is to disable Gemini in Gmail entirely. Disabling Gemini in Gmail means you’ll lose access to all of its features, like suggested replies, message composition assistance, Google Calendar integration, the Gemini sidebar, and all that. And of course, you won’t be able to access the upcoming Personalized Smart Replies feature, which generates full replies to emails using context from your Google account, written in your writing style. Google really should have provided a toggle for these automated summaries, but alas, that hasn’t happened.
It’s up to you to decide whether losing Gemini’s other Gmail features is worth it, but if you start seeing automated summaries in your Gmail, this is the only known way to get rid of them at the moment. To disable Gemini in Gmail, open Gmail and click the Settings button at the top of the page. Here, go to See all settings , then scroll down to the Workspace smart features section. Click or tap Manage Workspace smart features settings . Finally, you’ll see a toggle for Smart features in Google Workspace . Turn it off, and you’re good to go. Presumably, the AI automated summaries will also come to desktop computers and maybe even the free version at some point, though Google hasn’t said anything about that yet.