Google Workspace's New AI Features Seem Genuinely Useful

As a tech journalist who uses Google Docs a lot, I'm used to clicking past various AI prompts and offers of assistance whenever I want to write something with my own human brain. Now, I'm going to have to use up even more clicks to hide the AI integrations on a blank page—though, this time, some of them actually seem genuinely useful.

Google is further upgrading Gemini's capabilities in Google Drive and its online office apps: Docs, Slides, and Sheets. You can now produce entire documents and spreadsheets with a prompt, create text that matches a particular style, and pull in relevant information from your Google Drive files, Gmail, Google Chat, and the web. These changes make Gemini inside Google Workspace "more personal, capable and collaborative" Google says, and they're rolling out now to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers with English set as their default language.

The old (top) and new (bottom) Gemini interfaces in Google Docs. Credit: Lifehacker

Google Docs gets new Gemini features

The new changes are most evident when you open up a new document: You'll see a new Gemini bar down at the bottom of the screen, together with various options for matching the style of another document with AI-generated text, and dropping in elements like an email draft or notes from a meeting. You can bring up this bar at any time by clicking the Gemini star icon at the bottom of your document.

You can type any prompt you like into the Gemini bar. Want a short story about fish? Need to send a stern email about on-street parking to the neighbors? Gemini can help. I actually tried the fish story one, and it wasn't too bad, in a generic sort of way. If you click the + (plus) button down in the lower left corner, meanwhile, you can choose to import data from Google Drive, Google Chat, Gmail, and the web.

Gemini wrote me a short story about fish. Credit: Lifehacker

This gives you a host of options. You can draft an email to your boss, and pull from your previous correspondence with them, for example, or plan a travel itinerary based on the recommendations someone has given you in Google Chat. I got Gemini to produce a table listing all the Oscar 2026 winners and it worked flawlessly. (Thank you to the human writers who published this information online.)

There are more ways to refine existing text, as well as generate new text. Just highlight a part of a document, then use a prompt to describe the changes you'd like. I asked Gemini to make the introduction to this article "more upbeat and jokey" and it suggested dropping in phrases like "hold on to your hats" and "AI bestie." (I declined to add them.) I also gave the new style matching feature a go. In a blank document, if you click the sliders icon on the Gemini bar, you can choose Match writing style to pick out an existing Google Doc. Your subsequent prompts for text generation will then match the style of the selected documents.

You can choose where Gemini looks for importing data. Credit: Lifehacker

When I pulled from my own work, Gemini was able to produce text that did read vaguely like I'd written it, but it was still rather stilted and, well, artificial. (That said, I could tell the difference from standard AI text.) For me, it's the ability to pull in information from elsewhere that makes this most useful, rather than the text generation capabilities. I told Gemini to connect to Google Drive and summarize everything I'd written for Lifehacker this year, and it did a respectable job: The doc was neatly formatted, informative, and (as far as I could tell) accurate.

Gemini also has new features in Sheets, Slides, and Drive

The updates in Sheets and Slides are similar to Docs: You get a much more prominent Gemini prompt box, and the ability to import data from your other files, chats, and emails. I keep a text document of teams for our local five-a-side soccer matches, and tried to get Gemini to create a spreadsheet showing how often each player had shown up. It worked perfectly. Impressive stuff.

I also tried to get Gemini to produce an entire spreadsheet around a fictional school sports day, and again it came up with results that I couldn't really fault. I could then apply edits to the demo spreadsheet with further prompts, and didn't have to bother with editing cells at all. The AI will sometimes ask you to approve a particular action, but it's mostly a smooth and straightforward process.

Google suggests you could build a spreadsheet organizing a house move, for example, pulling in relevant emails and documents as needed. You can also use web or Google Drive searches to fill in data alongside relevant row and column headings—like the Oscar example mentioned earlier. You can plot the years across the top with an 'Oscar Best Picture Winner' heading, and Gemini does the rest. The Gemini integration inside Slides isn't quite as advanced yet, however. The ability to generate entire decks is still "coming soon" Google says. However, you can already pull in data from other sources and the web, match slideshow styles to an existing deck, and use prompts to tweak all aspects of your presentation. For me, this was still a bit hit or miss, with some odd formatting and text choices.

As a Brit, the only upgrades I haven't been able to try out myself are the Gemini upgrades for Google Drive interface. Unlike the other updates, these are only available in the U.S. for the time being. Based on Google's information and the demos I've seen, you can think of these upgrades as AI Overviews for your cloud storage rather than the web as a whole.

This school sports day never happened: Gemini made it up. Credit: Lifehacker

That means you can ask natural language questions about whatever's in your Google Drive, questions like "how many times have I written about Gemini in 2026?" for example. Google's own example is selecting a bunch of tax documents and asking Gemini for questions you should give your tax advisor about them.

My gripes about AI-generated text and the erosion of our abilities to write aside, these upgrades do seem genuinely useful. They promise to reduce the time you spend on simple and repetitive tasks, and make creating files with information from your other Google apps (or the web at large) much more straightforward.

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