Gemini in Gmail needs these five upgrades

It’s strange, isn’t it: On one hand, Gemini can create a detailed seven-day itinerary for my trip to London, suggest a list of hotels based on my specific preferences, and look up the best flight times for me. But on the other hand, it fails at even the most basic of tasks. It’s mind-boggling to say the least.

Take Gmail, for example. Gemini is well-integrated with Google’s email service and can pull up a specific attachment so I don’t have to search for it manually. It can help me write an email, summarize a long thread, and perform plenty of other nifty tricks. However, it can’t do a few basic tasks that I would find extremely valuable — the kind of things that would save me hours of manual labor.

I’ll be honest: my email management skills are poor. I was able to stay on top of things back when Google still had Inbox, but in the standard Gmail interface, the unread emails just keep piling up. I have well over a thousand of them at the moment, and that’s just in my personal account.

I really wanted to clean up my inbox, so I asked Gemini to help me out. While it successfully filtered my emails and showed me only the unread ones, it was unable to delete them for me. This seems like a simple task, and it would be incredibly helpful since doing it manually is a slow, painful process.

AI should be about saving time and doing the grunt work. I don’t understand why this simple feature hasn’t been rolled out to Gemini in Gmail yet. I get that the AI might mess things up occasionally, but there are easy ways around that — like an “undo” button that appears after the AI deletes what was requested.

The reason I have so many unread emails is because of those relentless newsletter subscriptions. They’ve piled up over the years, and unsubscribing from each one is a painfully slow process.

I thought Gemini could help me out, but I was wrong. I prompted it by saying that if I hadn’t opened the last five emails from a specific newsletter, it should go ahead and unsubscribe me. The AI refused.

The ability to have an AI unsubscribe me from newsletters, paired with the ability to mass-delete specific emails, would allow me to clean up my inbox in a matter of minutes. Without it, I’m looking at hours of manual work. Gmail already has an “Unsubscribe” button at the top of most newsletters to speed things up; having Gemini click it for me would be blazingly fast.

I use Gemini a lot, and to speed up the process, I prefer using voice prompts instead of typing. This works brilliantly in the dedicated Gemini app, but it’s nowhere to be found in Gmail.

There is no microphone button available — not in the Gmail Android app and not when accessing Gmail through a desktop browser. I have to type everything manually, which is a major time-sink. While it’s not the end of the world for short queries, once you get the hang of using voice prompts, going back to typing feels like a massive step backward.

I know I can technically do this within the Gemini app interface using extensions, but I shouldn’t have to switch to another app just to ask for a recent attachment. If voice prompts work within Gemini’s native app, they should be supported across all Google Workspace integrations.

Whenever I’m away for a few days, I like to turn on my vacation responder so people know I’m out of the office. It isn’t a difficult process to do manually, but I’d still prefer to have Gemini handle it. It refused.

My idea was a simple voice prompt: “I’ll be out of the office from [Date] to [Date], so turn on my vacation responder and write a message saying I’m away and will get back to people shortly.” Instead of doing it, Gemini just gave me instructions on how to do it myself. It can write the memo, but it won’t actually apply it to the settings. I have to copy and paste it myself. Gemini cites “security reasons” for this refusal, but for a simple vacation message, that feels like overkill.

Looking at the same Gmail theme gets boring after a while. It’s like having the same wallpaper on your phone forever; I need a bit of fresh energy every now and then.

I’d love it if Gemini could not only change my theme for me but also generate new ones based on my prompts. If it can generate a high-resolution image of a cat wearing a funny hat while drinking milk out of a champagne glass on a beach (image above), how hard can it be to generate a Gmail background?

Quite hard, apparently. Just like with the vacation responder, all I got were instructions on how to do it manually. I was really excited about the prospect of having a unique, AI-generated Gmail theme based on my specific visual preferences, but I guess that’s a feature we’ll have to wait for.

These are just a few things I’d like to see Gemini handle in Gmail, but the list goes on. What about you? What tasks do you wish your AI assistant could finally take off your plate? Let me know in the comments.