Gemini will integrate with Calendar, Tasks, and Keep

Part of Google’s vision at its I/O developer conference this year has involved transforming its Gemini AI chatbot into more of a digital assistant that specializes in dealing with our day-to-day tedium. One of the new ways it’s doing that is by integrating Gemini with Google Calendar, Tasks, and Keep.

The new integrations, which Google says are coming “soon” come by way of the extensions the company added to Bard last year and have continued with its Gemini chatbot. To use those, you just ask Gemini to do something involving one of the new services it can tap into, like summarize your emails in Gmail for the day, or type an @ symbol into Gemini’s text box to bring up a list of extensions like Google Docs or Drive.

The Gemini chatbot also supports uploading images on the web or in the Google smartphone app, so one example Google offered is taking a picture of a list of school events and having Gemini add them to your personal Google Calendar. That sounds great for me, a parent who would love to just point my phone at a piece of paper and say, “Hey dingus, add all of this to my kid’s calendar” instead of relying on my ADHD-addled brain to remember to do it manually.

Another example Google offered is having Gemini add items from a recipe to a Google Keep shopping list. It’s not a total black box, though — you’ll have a chance to check Gemini’s work before it carries out what you’re asking for, according to head of Gemini Sissie Hsiao during a briefing The Verge attended ahead of the launch.

The new integrations could have far less friction than dealing with Google Assistant or Siri, assuming it gets all the information right. Sure, you can ask other assistants to add calendar events, but you never know if you’re saying the right incantation to get all of the information — dates, times, locations — in the right place on the right calendar.

We won’t know if the Gemini chatbot and its multimodal AI contemporaries that are starting to trickle out now will do a better job until they’re in front of us. But boy, would I rather be able to take pictures of a piece of paper than forget it’s my kid’s turn to bring snacks to school because I got distracted while I was updating my calendar. Google says the new integrations are coming “soon.”