Step away from your computer or phone for a few minutes, and you might return to an avalanche of notifications about new messages. If you're using Chat, you won't have to comb through them all to find out what you missed anymore, thanks to Google's Gemini AI assistant. You can pull up Gemini from the Google Chat sidebar and ask the AI to summarize the conversation and dig into the most important bits.

The new feature expands Gemini's presence from other Google Workspace applications like Docs and Drive into Google Chat. If you click on the "Ask Gemini" icon at the top of the Google Chat interface, a chat window for the AI will appear where you can ask about what's been said in group chats, direct messages, and spaces. If you ask the AI to "catch me up," you'll get a complete conversation summary, which you can ask for in bullet points.

If it's too short, you can request a longer summary too. You can also ask for more specific details, like any requests for help, key takeaways, or other decisions made in the thread. You can even ask about other people's tasks or what a person said about specific topics.

The demo below shows how it works. Gemini Chat Gemini can't sort through your entire conversational history, just the current view. It also is restricted to Google Chat.

That means no emails or files in Google Drive, despite Gemini having a presence and access to those applications in other circumstances. Google claims this is deliberate as it maintains focus on the current cha.