Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007

Gmail can now use Google’s Gemini AI to recognize when a message includes something that looks like an event and then offer to add it to your calendar.

The screenshot illustrating the feature shows Gmail’s web app, a message including the phrase “9am this Tuesday,” and a Gemini sidebar in which the AI assistant offers to create an appointment for that date and time.

Google notes some limits to the feature: It’s not available in Gmail’s mobile apps; it only works in English; and it doesn’t surface for the limited set of messages from which Gmail can already extract events, like flight bookings and restaurant reservations.

Plus, it requires a Google Workspace subscription, with pricing starting at $84 per year per user for a Business Starter plan that offers 30GB of storage. Google ratcheted up those rates in January—by $12 a year in Business Starter’s case—when it added Gemini to Workspace.  

To use this new feature, Workspace subscribers will need to turn on “smart features and personalization.” Google says the rollout will run through the middle of April; I don’t have it in my own Workspace account yet.

Users of the free version of Gmail can access this feature now, on desktop and mobile devices, and at no additional cost by syncing their Gmail account to Apple’s Mail app for macOS, iOS, or iPadOS. And, in the case of Mail for macOS, they could have done so at any point since October 2007, which is when Apple shipped an add-to-calendar shortcut in Mac OS X Leopard.

Like Google’s new feature, Apple’s detects calendar-adjacent content in a message like “tomorrow” or “March 17” and invites you to add a corresponding event to your calendar. 

You can do so by hovering over that text in Mail for macOS until an add-to-calendar prompt appears, tapping the underline shown under that text in Mail for iOS or iPadOS, or by accepting the Siri suggestion shown at the top of the message. 

I use this all the time on my Mac and iPad, and my only complaint is that the add-to-calendar dialog doesn’t let you set a time zone, requiring me to flip over to the Calendar app to fix that for out-of-town events.

Unlike Google’s feature, however, Apple’s consists of mere software instead of AI. And this software in question is based on a technology called Apple Data Detectors that not only predates any current notion of AI but predates Google itself: Apple’s Advanced Technology Group developed it in the late 1990s.

About Rob Pegoraro

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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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