CC Tests Power Up Google Gmail

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, Google is testing a new email based productivity system. This is going to be built straight into Gmail. It's called CC and it's going to help give you a summary email of everything you need to do at the beginning of every day. There's a lot of interesting startups that I feel like have tried to do concepts of this. Gmail obviously I think being one of the most powerful because they have literal access. They don't need permission. They can see all of your emails and give you a really good summary of a lot of different tasks, things that need to be done.

0:32But the response on this has been a little bit mixed for a couple of different reasons that we're going to get into on this show. So before we get into all of that, I wanted to mention, if you want to try all of the different AI models that I talk about on the show, I'd love for you to check out my startup, which is called AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link in the description. It lets you access the top 40 different AI models, everything from Google Gemini to OpenAI to Anthropics Cloud to Grok to 11 Labs for audio, tons of cool image models, all for$20 a month in one platform. so you don't have to manage a ton of different tabs and a ton of different subscriptions.

1:07I hope it saves you time and money. You can compare the results of different AI models side by side and see which one you like the best. So you can go check out AIbox.ai if you want to give it a try. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Google right now. So I think productivity right now is just an area where companies are constantly trying to experiment with these new AI assistants. They're trying to save people time and money. and I think because of that we've definitely seen a lot of adoption in this place I think it's one area that basically everyone can get on board they're excited with if there's tools that can save them time people are interested in that so there's a new product built into gmail it's called cc it's going to be powered by gemini and it essentially connects your account and not just like your gmail but your gmail your google drive your google calendar and it gives you a daily brief.

1:58So it's an email that it will send you. It's called the Your Day Ahead email. And it basically lets you know all of your different tasks. It summarizes your calendar. So what's on your calendar for that day. It gives you a bunch of different updates from the day and things that need to happen. I'll give you an example that they shared. So they had, you know, a sample email that you get. This is for someone named Elisa. And it's like, it has this kind of top of mind section with some bullet points and it's like it tells how many minutes it's going to take to accomplish the task it's like five minutes pay the 450 daycare invoice due and then it does have a link to details on on where to go pay that which i think is really useful um and then it's got like another one it's like you know swim meet is sunday at 10 a.m add to your calendar um and then it's like sign leo's field trip form due tomorrow and it's got like a link to go do the thing then it says book the babysitter for your Friday night date night and it says like draft an email although I don't know how many people email their babysitters but that's just I mean I guess just a funny a funny one and then it has a little FYI section where it's like financial notes your rent payment of$1 ,500 is scheduled for tomorrow your auto loan of$500 is scheduled for Friday RSVPs needed Maya's birthday party your deliveries and deals kids rain boots are scheduled for delivery today.

3:17So I mean, like, really, it's a literal summary of every single thing in your email. I almost like, could see this being as a fantastic replacement for Gmail, like, like, if I could just see this giant list of things like your the rain boots are scheduled, and I just like click a little okay button or remove, like, I would hope that it would just remove the Amazon email in my inbox, or maybe mark it as red or something. Because I could just see like, this is actually really great it would save me a lot of time just skimming through everything you you'd be concerned that you'd miss things that might be important but if they can solve that problem make sure all of the data is in there i think it'd be fantastic i just don't want to ever have to see those emails i currently have an inbox with you know like 500 unread emails that somehow i missed way back in the past i'm never going back to page 2000 to find them and so i mean i permanently just have these unread emails which drive me crazy um and so it's you know, every day, you're just skimming through a whole bunch of emails, I feel like my Gmail is an absolute mess.

4:17I don't know if anyone else feels that way. Perhaps I'm the only one out there, I would love a solution that could get me to inbox zero that could just remove any unnecessary emails, maybe archive them all, I can go find them later if I need them. But yeah, overall, I think this is a great tool, I just be concerned that it's you're getting to you're getting like a summary email list, and then you got to go read your full email list anyways, after so as long as they can solve that problem, I think that'd be great. At the bottom of their CC that they give you every day, they have an on your calendar thing, which is just things that are happening that day on your calendar.

4:53I'm, I guess, perhaps it's slightly useful to see it like on a text format. Personally, like clicking on my calendar app, and just seeing it on my calendar takes like three seconds and gives me a really good visualization of what I have going on each day. but you know they have it listed out like 1 p.m you are going you have a private house viewing it's going to take you 30 minutes here's a link to the event on your google calendar this is the location this is your second visit remember to check the backyard space like i don't know it perhaps it's useful because it's adding like a little bit of extra context that maybe you've messaged your like realtor about um but i'm i feel like the calendar part you probably would just want to click on your calendar app.

5:34I don't know, maybe that's maybe that's just me. Like my goal here is I would hate to just duplicate everything you do every day and do it twice. If you could really find a way to make this tool. So it's removing something that you have to do every day. I think that makes it very useful. So I'm excited, though, because it feels like Google is working on innovating inside of Gmail, which in my opinion, is a very cluttered product with a million newsletters that I never subscribed to hitting me every single day and a million different inbound people reaching out to try to sell me stuff or in my case personally I get probably 15 different podcast pitches every day if people want to come on the podcast so it's really really feels like spammy and full of a bunch of junk and I gotta weed through it every day so if there's a tool that can help me do that I've tried different AI agents like OpenAI's Atlas which isn't quite to there.

6:28I feel like whenever Google Gemini comes out with something that's equivalent, that'll probably be a good tool considering it's, you know, built by Google. But until that day comes, I guess we're stuck with these summary emails. It'd be great if you could just have an agent go in there, read everything, clear out your email, give you a couple things that were useful. Honestly, Google without using an agent has the data to probably be able to do that if they wanted to. So I think there's a bunch of great options that I would love to see in this over on x uh the results have been pretty mixed a lot of people in the comments are kind of positive about it um one thing that a lot of people mentioned is just how hard it is to sign up for and i experienced that myself when trying to sign up for it um chad boida said why is every launch a bad experience for your best paying customers for years now constantly letting down by this gating that only enables me to try your features on the most useless of my accounts so So what he's mentioning is that when he tried to sign up, it said that CC is available only for Gmail consumer accounts at the moment, so not for like the business accounts or the Workspace accounts.

7:32I personally went and tried to sign up for it, and it said sign up failed on my email. Please enable Google Workspace smart features in other Google products, Gmail settings to use CC. So again, I think this is something that's annoying because obviously Google has access to the settings of my Gmail, and I'm signing up through Google and it's telling me to go into my Gmail, into a couple of the settings features, Google Workspace Smart features in the Google products Gmail settings. Anyways, I don't know if I'm actually going to get around to doing that because I'm busy and I don't want to have to go dig through my settings to try to enable this feature that I think I have a pretty good idea of what it does and I'm not 100 % sure I'm going to use.

8:12If Google wanted to make this easy on 100 different things, so there's like 10 different screenshots I'm seeing of other people that they have this big sign up failed bubble, I think obviously Google has a very easy way of just making this so when you go try to sign up it automatically enables it that you know like if I say I want to sign up for something I don't want to have to go and enable different settings I would think it should just have a little toggle it's like do you want to enable the setting and it says yes so or if you know you don't have the right type of Gmail account maybe it says you're ineligible before you go and try to do the whole sign up process I think yeah it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouth when they they try to go sign up for your new feature that you launch and you're showing off to everyone and for some reason it it doesn't work and it seems like this is something that could have easily been avoided but in any case uh i'll stop my griping i think overall the the product is sort of cool and i like the direction that gmail is taking in making some innovation and summarizing your emails because i think basically it's them admitting that gmail is over cluttered and overcrowded otherwise why would you need to do this so anyways i think this is cool is it one more email that you get every day or is it a summary email that's going to stop you from reading any of your other emails?

9:19That's the real question. And I hope that the direction moves them in a way that makes it so I don't have to read any more emails in the future. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. Hope this was useful. I hope this saved you some time trying to sign up for it or if you absolutely love this idea, it gave you a good idea of what you should sign up for and the direction that Gmail and email is going in the future. Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, make sure to go check out AIbox.ai for access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place for$20 a month.

9:47Thanks so much for tuning in. I will catch you in the next episode.