Gmail’s AI Inbox is now more widely available but will cost you

If you’ve been waiting for the AI Inbox in Gmail to become more widely available, today’s the day. This was initially only usable by “trusted testers” in January, but has now started rolling out for anyone in the US. There is, however, a gigantic caveat.

It’s currently only available with the Google AI Ultra subscription, which is a whopping $249.99 per month. There’s also the smaller caveat that this is labeled as beta, but then again Gmail itself was in beta for many years, so that’s probably less relevant.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the AI Inbox isn’t really an inbox – it’s a summary of what you need to look at, based on the emails you’ve received. The AI gives you a list of suggested to-dos from your inbox, as well as “topics to catch up on”.

Of course, you need to trust Gemini (which is obviously powering this feature) that it won’t miss anything important, or won’t make anything up. That’s not a small ask these days – maybe AI will get better at being trustworthy in time, but we’re not quite there yet.

At this point it’s unclear if Google plans to roll AI Inbox out to subscribers to cheaper AI plans too at some point in the future or if this will remain a differentiating factor for the most expensive subscription forever. It’s probably going to be the former, but there’s no official confirmation yet.

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