The right sidebar in Googles Workspace apps is now the center for a lot of Googles AI plans. The company announced today at its I/O developer conference that it is bringing Gemini 1.5 Pro, its latest mainstream language model, to the sidebar in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and Gmail. Itll be the same virtual assistant across all of those apps, and the key bit is that itll know about everything you have saved everywhere.

The idea seems to be to use Gemini to connect all the Workspace apps more seamlessly. According to Aparna Pappu, the general manager and VP of Workspace, Google users have long been trying to hack Gemini to do complicated, multi-app things: send an email based on the data theyre looking at in Sheets or add a reminder to respond to the email they were currently looking at. And since Gemini has access to all of your documents, emails, and files, it can answer questions without forcing you to switch apps.

In a briefing with press ahead of I/O, Pappu gave the example of searching for information about a New York Knicks game. I could ask something like, what time do doors open for the Knicks game, and Im not looking for information from the web, which is going to give me generic information. I want information from my ticket, which happens to be a PDF in my email somewhere. Gemini can find that information, and Pappu said early users are quickly learning to use it as a way to find things more quickly.

Among early testers, Pappu said, a popular use case has been receipts. Rather than dig through your email, your files, and everything, you can just ask Gemini to find and organize all your receipts from across your Google account. And lets say you hit on the prompt that says Put my expenses in a Drive folder, she says, from there Gemini can put them all into a Sheet.

In keeping with so many of Googles announcements at I/O, the Workspace team seems to be focused on using Gemini to help you get stuff done and do stuff on your behalf. Pappu talked about how popular Gmails Help me write feature has been, especially on mobile, where people dont want to type as much. By grounding the model in your data and not the entire internet, Google hopes it can also begin to mitigate the models tendency to hallucinate and make other mistakes.

At least for now, the new sidebar isnt for everyone: its available now to some early testers and will roll out to paid Gemini subscribers next month. But Pappu did say Google is looking at how it could use on-device models to bring the capabilities to more users over time, so your days of hunting through Google Drive to find that old PDF may finally be coming to an end. Eventually.

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Google's Gemini AI is coming to the sidebar in Docs, Drive, Gmail, and more - The Verge