Every day after I wake up and make tea, I hop back in bed and catch up on emails, messages, and usually give myself 20-30 minutes to play some games before I dive into the day’s activities. While I don’t usually like to spend too much time on my phone first thing, some days I’m more inundated with tasks than others. That is, until one day when Gemini Daily Brief showed up in my notifications.
Now, I’m not the biggest fan of AI summaries or information encapsulation. Gemini and other AI agents are cool, but they get a lot wrong and it makes me generally want to ignore their existence. But Gemini Daily Brief has been surprisingly different, and it’s because of how Google surfaces calendar entries, emails, and other to-dos in an incredibly efficient way.
Daily Brief is one of the latest experiments Google is running in an effort to get its users more comfortable with using Gemini regularly, and if future attempts are as well thought out as this one, there’s a very real chance my opinion and usage of Gemini will change in a big way. It’s also a great way for the company to make its paid Gemini services feel more valuable, as Daily Brief is currently only available for people with a Google AI Plus, Pro, or Ultra subscription.
What makes Gemini Daily Brief special
Samsung and Google have both experimented with “daily briefing”-style apps on their phones over the past two years. Samsung’s Now Brief, for instance, pulls from sources on your phone, such as the Samsung Health app, your calendar, Digital Wellbeing, and more. While those are all fine, I’ve never found consolidating these sources in a single place useful. Google even got rid of Daily Hub after poor user feedback, and it looks like the company took everything it learned from these mediocre attempts and turned it into something far more useful with Gemini Daily Brief.
Meanwhile, Google’s latest Gemini updates have mainly revolved around organizing the oodles of personal information you already have stored on the company’s servers. From email to to-do lists, chats, documents, photos, and searches, most of us rely on Google for a significant portion of our Internet usage, so it makes sense that the company’s personal AI assistant (Gemini) should be able to tap into those sources to deliver a more personal web.
So while my Daily Brief might show me the latest emails, my newest published articles and YouTube videos, as well as actionable information for each of those tasks, yours will likely look quite a bit different. Google provides this list as a few examples:
- For students: Manage class schedules, organize study plans, and track applications.
- For entrepreneurs: Surface actionable client emails and update task reminders.
- For parents: Manage school communications, track family milestones, and handle household tasks.
- For job seekers: Quickly act on recruiter inquiries, prepare for interviews, and monitor application statuses.
This deeply personal, customizable nature makes it feel like Gemini understands you and your needs. The most impressive part is that I didn’t have to configure anything to get it to personalize my Daily Brief like this. It just appeared, and it felt like the first time Gemini was more than just a ChatGPT prompt clone.
As I mentioned previously, Daily Brief is only available for paid Google AI subscribers. In addition to that, you’ll need to enable Personal Intelligence, then connect Gemini to Google Workspace and also enable the Gemini Memory feature.
How does Gemini Daily Brief work?
Every day, Gemini Daily Brief will generate a notification in the morning that you can click to pull up the report. Daily Brief is technically “just” a Gemini chat, not a separate app or email, but it can be accessed at any time in the Gemini app. Here’s how to see it manually:
1. Open the Gemini app on your phone. It should be an icon in your app drawer.
2. In the Gemini app, tap the hamburger menu in the top left corner, then tap Daily Brief.
It’s surprisingly simple to find, and the cool part is that you can perform more actions on each of the bullet points Daily Brief creates.
At the bottom of each item, click the three-dot menu to reveal additional actions. You can mark each task as complete (if applicable) or start a chat with Gemini about that specific item. This section also shows each item’s source, so you can figure out where that one weird item might have come from.
Many items have additional actions, usually shown with a contextual button at the end of the item. For instance, you might have an upcoming meeting about an important product update, and Gemini may suggest brainstorming presentation ideas. Tapping that button will create a new chat with a list of actionable items, generally including several sections with different ideas.
The bottom of this chat gives you the ability to branch specific ideas into another new chat, export the whole chat to a Google Doc, draft it in Gmail, and more.
You can also use the buttons at the bottom to provide feedback, which should improve future chats and ideas from Gemini. If it’s more convenient, you can also tap the speaker button at the bottom of the chat to have Gemini read out the whole list of ideas.
I’ve had a lot of success feeling more organized at the beginning of my day thanks to Gemini Daily Brief, and I love how easy it is not only to view the report at any time but also to get more information on specific items when I need it. Give it a try! I’m willing to bet you’re going to love it, too.
