Google Gemini can now scan emails to create Calendar events

Is there anything better than chatting with someone about making plans, and then they take the initiative to send you a Calendar invite? It’s not like it’s difficult to add events to your own Google Calendar, but it’s just so blissfully frictionless when someone else sets everything up on our behalf. If you’re a fan of that kind of hands-off approach to managing your Calendar, you might just find yourself signing up for a Google AI Premium plan, as the company announces a new Gemini-powered Calendar tool for Gmail.

Over the course of the past year, Google’s been dialing up Gemini’s presence across its apps and services, and that’s already meant paying some attention to the interaction between Gmail and Calendar. This past fall, we saw Google bring new Calendar-related functionality to Gmail’s Gemini side panel, letting you have Gemini set up new Calendar events on your behalf. That was a start, but now Google’s helping to make things even more seamless.

Google Workspace users and individuals with an AI Premium plan are getting access to a new “Add to Calendar” Gemini button at the top of their emails. Even without an explicit Calendar invitation being sent, Gemini is able to parse your emails and understand the details of the event under discussion. While Gemini will understandably try to fill in all the blanks for itself, you’ll still have a chance to edit things in the side panel if it needs a little extra help.

Of all the tasks we’ve heard about AI being deployed to solve, this one feels like one of the most legitimately practical. Getting an event actually posted on your Google Calendar is one of the easiest ways to make sure you’re going to be ready for it, and a tool that lowers the bar for getting that done with some smart automation sounds like an absolute win. Really, the only downside we see here is this being locked behind Google’s AI Premium paywall — at least for now, anyway. Feeling any more tempted to sign up?