Welcome to the podcast.
I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
Today on the show, Google is testing a new email-based productivity system.
This is gonna be built straight into Gmail.
It's called CC and it's gonna help give you a summary email of everything you need to do at the beginning of every day.
There's a lot of interesting startups that I feel like have tried to do concepts of this.
Gmail obviously, I think, being one of the most powerful because they have literal access, they don't need permission.
They can see all of your emails and give you a really good summary of a lot of different tasks, things that need to be done.
But the response on this has been a little bit mixed for a couple of different reasons that we're going to get into on the show.
So, before we get into all of that, I wanted to mention if you want to try all of the different AI models that I talk about on the show.
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All right, let's talk about what's going on with Google right now.
So I think productivity right now is just an area where companies are constantly trying to experiment with these new AI assistants.
They're trying to save people time and money.
And I think because of that...
We've definitely seen a lot of adoption in this place.
I think it's one area that basically everyone can get on board.
They're excited with if there's tools that can save them time.
People are interested in that.
So there's a new product built into Gmail.
It's called CC.
It's going to be powered by Gemini and it essentially connects your account and not just like your Gmail, but your Gmail, your Google Drive, your Google Calendar, and it gives you a daily brief.
So it's an email that it will send you.
It's called the Your Day Ahead email and And it basically lets you know all of your different tasks.
It summarizes your calendar.
So what's on your calendar for that day.
It gives you a bunch of different updates from the day and things that need to happen.
I'll give you an example that they shared.
So they had, you know, a sample email that you get.
This is for someone named Elisa.
And it's like, it has this kind of top of mind section with some bullet points.
And it's like, It tells how many minutes it's going to take to accomplish the task.
It's like five minutes.
Pay the $450 daycare invoice due.
And then it does have a link to details on where to go pay that, which I think is really useful.
And then it's got like another one.
It's like you know, swim meet is sunday at 10 am.
Add to your calendar, um.
And then it's like sign leo's field trip form due tomorrow, and it's got like a link to go do the thing.
Then it says book the babysitter for your friday night, date night.
And it says like draft an email, although i don't know how many people email their babysitters, but that's just.
I mean, i guess just a funny, A funny one.
And then it has a little FYI section where it's like financial notes.
Your rent payment of $1,500 is scheduled for tomorrow.
Your auto loan of $500 is scheduled for Friday.
RSVPs needed.
Maya's birthday party.
Your deliveries and deals.
Kids rain boots are scheduled for delivery today.
So, I mean, like really it's a literal summary of every single thing in your email.
I almost like could see this being as a fantastic replacement for Gmail.
Like if I could just see this giant list of things like the rain boots are scheduled, and I would just like click a little OK button or remove.
Like I would hope that it would just remove the Amazon email in my inbox or maybe mark it as red or something.
Um, because i could just see like this is actually really great.
It would save me a lot of time just skimming through everything.
You you'd be concerned that you'd miss things that might be important.
But if they can solve that problem make sure all of the data is in there i think it'd be fantastic.
I just don't want to ever have to see those emails.
I currently have an inbox with, you know, like 500 unread emails that somehow i missed way back in the past.
I'm never going back to page 2000 to find them.
And so I mean, I permanently just have these unread emails, which drive me crazy.
And so it's.
You know.
Every day you're just skimming through a whole bunch of emails.
I feel like my Gmail is an absolute mess.
I don't know if anyone else feels that way.
Perhaps I'm the only one out there.
I would love a solution that could get me to inbox zero.
That could just remove any unnecessary emails, maybe archive them all.
I can go find them later if I need them.
But yeah, overall, I think this is a great tool.
I just be concerned that it's you're getting to, you're getting like a summary email list and then you go read your full email list anyways after.
So as long as they can solve that problem, I think that'd be great.
At the bottom of their CC that they give you every day.
They have an on your calendar thing, which is just things that are happening that day on your calendar.
I'm I guess perhaps it's slightly useful to see it like on a text format.
Personally like clicking on my calendar app and just seeing it on my calendar takes like three seconds and gives me a really good visualization of what I have going on each day.
But, you know, they have it listed out like 1 p.m.
You have a private house viewing.
It's going to take you 30 minutes.
Here's a link to the event on your Google Calendar.
This is the location.
This is your second visit.
Remember to check the backyard space.
Like...
I don't know.
Perhaps it's useful because it's adding a little bit of extra context that maybe you message your realtor about.
But I feel like the calendar part, you probably would just want to click on your calendar app.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just me.
My goal here is I would hate to just duplicate everything you do every day and do it twice.
If you could really find a way to make this tool so.
It's removing something that you have to do every day.
I think that makes it very useful.
So I'm excited though, because it feels like Google is working on innovating inside of Gmail which, in my opinion, is a very cluttered product, with a million newsletters that I never subscribe to hitting me every single day and a million different inbound people reaching out to try to sell me stuff.
Or in my case personally, I get probably 15 different podcast pitches every day of people wanting to come on the podcast.
So it's really, really feels like spammy and full of a bunch of junk and I got to weed through it every day.
So if there is a tool that could help me do that, I've tried different AI agents, like OpenAI's Atlas, which isn't quite there.
I feel like whenever Google Gemini comes out with something that's equivalent, that'll probably be a good tool, considering it's, you know, built by Google.
But until that day comes, I guess we're stuck with these summary emails.
It'd be great if you could just have an agent go in there, read everything, clear out your email.
Give you a couple things that were useful.
Honestly Google, without using an agent, has the data to probably be able to do that if they wanted to.
So I think there's a bunch of great options that I would love to see in this.
Over on X, the results have been pretty mixed.
A lot of people in the comments are kind of positive about it.
One thing that a lot of people mentioned is just how hard it is to sign up for.
And I experienced that myself when trying to sign up for it.
Chad Boyda said, why is every launch a bad experience for your best paying customers?
For years now, constantly letting down by this gating that only enables me to try your features on the most useless of my accounts.
So what he's mentioned mentioning is that when he tried to sign up, it said that CC is available only for Gmail consumer accounts at the moment.
So not for like the business accounts or the workspace accounts.
I personally went and tried to sign up for it and it said sign up failed on my email.
Please enable Google Workspace smart features in other Google products Gmail settings to use CC.
So again, I think this is something that's annoying because obviously Google has access to the settings of my Gmail and I'm signing up through Google, through Google, and it's telling me to go into my Gmail, into a couple of the settings features Google workspace, smart features in the Google products, Gmail settings.
Anyways, I like I don't know if I'm actually going to get around to doing that because I'm busy and I don't want to have to go dig through my settings to try to enable this feature that I think I have a pretty good idea of what it does and I'm not 100 sure I'm going to use.
If Google wanted to make this easy on a hundred different things.
So there's like 10 different screenshots.
I'm seeing of other people that they have this big like sign up failed bubble.
I think obviously, Google has a very easy way of just making this.
So when you go, try to sign up, it automatically enables it.
You know, like if I say I want to sign up for something, I don't want to have to go and enable different settings.
I would think it should just have a little toggle that's like, do you want to enable the setting?
And it says yes automatically.
So, or if you know you don't have the right type of Gmail account, maybe it says you're ineligible.
Before you go and try to do the whole signup process.
I think yeah.
It just leaves a bad taste in people's mouth when they try to go sign up for your new feature that you launched and you're showing off to everyone.
And for some reason it doesn't work.
And it seems like this was something that could have easily been avoided.
But in any case, I'll stop my griping.
I think overall, the product is sort of cool.
And I like the direction that Gmail is taking in making some innovation and summarizing your emails, because I think basically, it's them admitting that Gmail is overcrowded and overcrowded.
Otherwise, why would you need to do this?
So anyways, I think this is cool.
Is it one more email that you get every day?
Or is it a summary email that's going to stop you from reading any of your other emails?
That's the real question.
And I hope that the direction moves them in a way that makes it so I don't have to read any more emails in the future.
Thanks for tuning into the podcast.
Hope this was useful.
I hope this saved you some time trying to sign up for it.
Or if you absolutely love this idea.
It gave you a good idea of what you should sign up for and the direction that Gmail and email is going in the future.
Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.
And, as always, make sure to go check out AIboxai for access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place, for 20 a month.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
I'll catch you in the next episode.
