Every day after waking up and making tea, I go back to bed and catch up on emails, messages and usually give myself 20-30 minutes to play a few games before diving into the day’s activities. While I typically don’t like to spend too much time on my phone, some days I’m more inundated with tasks than others. That is, until one day Gemini Daily Brief appeared in my notifications.
Now, I’m not a big fan of AI summaries or information encapsulation. Gemini and other AI agents are great, but they get things wrong a lot and it generally makes me want to ignore their existence. But Gemini Daily Brief has been surprisingly different, and it’s because of how Google displays 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 using Gemini regularly, and if future attempts are as well thought out as this one, there’s a very real chance that my opinion and use of Gemini will change greatly. It’s also a great way for the company to make its Gemini paid services feel more valuable, as Daily Brief is currently only available to people with a Google AI Plus, Pro, or Ultra subscription.
What makes Gemini Daily Brief special?
Samsung and Google have experimented with “daily information” style apps on their phones for the past two years. Samsung Current SummaryFor example, it pulls sources from your phone, such as the Samsung Health app, your calendar, Digital Wellbeing, and more. While that’s all good and well, I’ve never found it useful to consolidate these sources into one place. Google even got rid of Daily Hub After bad user feedback, it seems like the company took everything it learned from these mediocre attempts and turned it into something much more useful with the Gemini Daily Brief.
Meanwhile, Google’s latest Gemini updates have largely revolved around organizing the large amount of personal information it already has 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 use, so it makes sense that the company’s artificial intelligence personal assistant (Gemini) could tap into those sources to deliver a more personal Web.
So while my Daily Summary can show me the latest emails, my most recent published articles and YouTube videos, as well as useful information for each of those tasks, yours will probably be a little different. Google provides this list as some examples:
- For students: Manage class schedules, organize study plans, and track requests.
- For entrepreneurs: Display actionable customer emails and update task reminders.
- For parents: Manage school communications, track family milestones, and handle household chores.
- For job seekers: Act quickly on recruiter inquiries, prepare for interviews, and monitor application status.
This deeply personal and customizable nature makes it seem like Gemini understands you and your needs. The most impressive part is that I didn’t have to configure anything to customize my daily summary this way. It just appeared, and it felt like the first time Gemini was more than just a ChatGPT Immediate cloning.
As I mentioned above, Daily Brief is only available to paid Google AI subscribers. On top of that, you’ll need to enable Personal Intelligence and then connect Gemini to Google Workspace and also enable the Gemini Memory feature.
How does the Gemini Daily Report work?
Every day, Gemini Daily Brief will generate a notification in the morning that you can click to open the report. Daily Brief is technically “just” a Gemini chat, not a separate app or email, but it can be accessed at any time from the Gemini app. Here’s how to view 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 Summary.
It’s surprisingly easy to find and the interesting thing is that you can perform more actions on each of the points that Daily Brief creates.
At the bottom of each item, click the three-dot menu to reveal additional actions. You can mark each task as completed (if applicable) or start a conversation with Gemini about that specific item. This section also shows the source of each item, so you can discover where that strange item might have come from.
Many elements have additional actions, usually displayed with a contextual button at the end of the element. For example, you may have an upcoming meeting about an important product update and Gemini can suggest brainstorming ideas for presentations. Tapping that button will create a new chat with a list of actionable items, which usually includes several sections with different ideas.
The bottom of this chat gives you the ability to branch specific ideas into another new chat, export the entire chat to a Google Doc, compose it in Gmail, and more.
You can also use the buttons at the bottom to provide feedback, which should improve future Gemini chats and ideas. If it’s more convenient, you can also tap the speaker button at the bottom of the chat to have Gemini read the full list of ideas.
I’ve had a lot of success feeling more organized at the start of my day thanks to Gemini Daily Brief, and I love how easy it is to not only view the report at any time but also get more information on specific items when I need it. Prove! I’m willing to bet you’ll love it too.
