Google isn’t completed infusing AI into your inbox. On Tuesday at their IO 2026 developer conference, the tech large declared an expansion of its “AI Inbox” functionality for Gmail, that is adding conversational AI features. That means you may ask Gmail about things in your inbox despite of typing in search terms.
The company stated that the Gemini AI-powered feature, referred to as Gmail Live, will support you quickly locate information lost in your inbox.
Perhaps you want information about your upcoming flight, the time of your dentist appointment, the door code on your Airbnb rental, or a few information about an event at your kid’s school, for instance.
Before, you’d have to type in keywords in the search box (or perhaps type in someone’s e-mail address with or domain) to try to narrow down your search. That doesn’t always make emails easy to locate, moreover, particularly if the search term is something found across numerous messages.
“Gmail Live can answer naturally phrased questions, reply to follow-up questions, and pivot if you require to break it,” Devanshi Bhandari, product lead for Gmail, explained in a briefing ahead of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, where the feature was first introduced to the public.
It’s another way that Google is trying to showcase how its AI technology can drive real-world improvements to products used by millions of clients, at a time while many outside the tech industry are questioning the value of AI, as latest data centers get built of their backyards, driving up their power bills.
Being able of factor to something as easy as making it easier to find something that’s lost to your email inbox — an experience nearly everyone has suffered at some point — will be a practical and positive use case for AI … or at lest, Google hopes.
Bhandari shows Gmail Live to reporters, asking the tool a series of questions about things within the inbox, like a child’s show-and-tell venture and their class trip, plus hotel and flight information for a trip to Detroit. Similar to using stand-alone AI chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT, Gmail users can ask these questions aloud in natural language, and the chatbot responds.
In the demo, Gmail Live also understood nuances between such things as “field trip” and “trip” and was able to bounce from one topic to another, Bhandari mentioned. Plus, the AI can pull granular details from emails, like a hotel room number, or infer which people you’re asking about, even when they’re not not explicitly named.
Similar voice technology is also coming to its to-do list, Google Keep, the corporations noted.
Particularly, Gmail Live is not replacing traditional Gmail search— it’s just another alternative.
Google may have learned that not everyone is prepared for an AI-only experience after it “upgraded” Google Photos with AI-powered search to much backlash. Google Photos later rolled back the feature, making using AI optional after several complaints.
Gmail is likewise gaining different new capabilities, which include ready-to-send drafts, quick file access, and the ability to manage to-dos by marking individual tasks as completed.
Plus, the AI Inbox experience, which released earlier this year, will expand beyond Google AI Ultra subscribers to attain Google AI Pro and Plus subscribers as well. This permits you to see an overview of the tasks and items to catch up on that are lost in your inbox, all on one page.
The voice-powered Gmail Live feature, moreover, will roll out later this summer and will initially be limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers.
