Google Introduces ‘Gemini Drops’ for Its AI Chatbot
Abner Li reports for 9to5 Google this week Google has begun doing what it calls monthly “Gemini Drops” for its AI assistant. On its Gemini Drop website, the company describes Gemini Drops as “[making] it easier to keep up with what’s being released” and encourages users to “check here regularly to find feature announcements, product tips, and see how our community is using Gemini to create, research, and do more.”
Gemini Drops are modeled after the Pixel Drops for Google’s flagship smartphones.
The Gemini Drop page features things like model updates such as Gemini 2.5 Pro, as well as accessibility-oriented features like Gemini Live Captions, but as Li points out, the latest addition is something Google calls Productivity Planner Gem. Google describes the Planner Gem as “[bringing] your emails, calendar, and more all in one place for your easiest prioritization yet.” According to Li, the software can do things like give you a morning brief on your task(s), plan and schedule products for the day, suggest which projects to tackle today, and more. The conceit here is obvious: Google is positioning Gemini as a tool with which people can be more productive in their work. Chatbots like Gemini that rely on artificial intelligence are particularly well-suited for such jobs. If nothing else, a computer’s greatest strength lies in its ability to automate. It’s why, for example, keyboard shortcuts exist or that we type documents on computers instead of typewriters or—as I did long ago—painstakingly written by hand.
But Gemini (and by extension, Planner Gem) is good for something else: accessibility.
To use Gemini to, say, automatically collate a list of one’s to-do items for the day can be a boon for a disabled people who, for instance, may have a cognitive condition that makes sorting through information inaccessible. Likewise, someone with visual and/or fine-motor disabilities may find it hard to comb through their task manager, however tidy it is, to find the top-line items to complete on a given day. Again, to utilize a tool like Planner Gem vis-a-vis Gemini to apply automation to this sort of digital housekeeping can be worth its weight in gold in an accessibility context. It does the work for a person in a way that isn’t born of sheer apathy or laziness—or even convenience. On the contrary, it taps into computers’ greatest strength to make being productive a more accessible endeavor. As I often say, this isn’t trivial, especially to disabled people.
It’s for these very reasons why I love using Gemini for web searches. While the AI hasn’t totally supplanted using Google Search in Safari, it has subsumed a lot of it for me. Having Gemini present me with information in a singular space, spanning various prompts, is far more accessible than juggling a trillion and one browser tabs. Of course I must be vigilant about possible errors and hallucination, but that’s okay; not everything found through in Google Search is, and never was, a paragon of truth anyway. One must be vigilant either way. Better yet, I like the warm and fuzzy feelings I get from using Gemini in this manner to keep my finger on the pulse of the hottest technology in AI.
The advent of Planner Gems comes on the heels of OpenAI releasing ChatGPT Agent. The tool is similarly scoped to Planner Gems, with OpenAI describing the Agent as “[completing] complex online tasks on your behalf [by] seamlessly [switching] between reasoning and action—conducting in-depth research across public websites, uploaded files, and connected third-party sources (like email and document repositories), and performing actions such as filling out forms and editing spreadsheets—all while keeping you in control.” My pal (and former editorial overlord) Federico Viticci at MacStories posted a piece over the weekend with his early thoughts on the software.
