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I tried Gmail's new Gemini Flows feature and it's a huge filter improvement with one big catch for power users.
The Goog giveth and the Goog taketh awayeth. I just found a cool new AI feature in Gmail that could prove indispensable for folks with a lot of email. That's the giveth. But the feature is quite limited by how many emails it will process before it just stops. That's the taketh awayeth.
Back in December, Google announced Google Workspace Studio, a tool for automating a variety of tasks inside the platform. Of course, you needed a Workspace account for this to be available. At least then. Now, Studio is open to more users.
As of my article on Gemini in Gmail from back in April, Workspace Studio Flows (Google's name for the little mini-scripts) was not available to my $20/mo Google AI Pro plan account. Last week, though, I noticed a new icon at the top of my Gmail interface.
Gemini tells me this addition is part of a big side-panel update that launched in May, which propagated across so-called "premium" user accounts in late May and June. Premium in this context means you're paying for either the $20/mo Google AI Pro or the $100/mo Google AI Ultra service.
I have Google AI Pro, so I have the magic icon. My wife does not subscribe to that plan, so her Gmail interface does not have the feature I'm about to describe.
As for whether the AI plans are worth it, you do get more Gemini usage with the paid tiers. My wife uses the free Gemini a lot. She limits her use mostly to text. As soon as I tried to generate more than a few Nano Banana images, I ran into usage blocks. That's why I originally upgraded to Pro.