And now it’s Google’s turn to Gemini ‘all the things’. From The Verge:

The right sidebar in Google’s Workspace apps is now the center for a lot of Google’s AI plans. The company announced today at its I/O developer conference that it is bringing Gemini 1.5 Pro, its latest mainstream language model, to the sidebar in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, and Gmail. It’ll be the same virtual assistant across all of those apps, and the key bit is that it’ll know about everything you have saved everywhere.

The idea seems to be to use Gemini to connect all the Workspace apps more seamlessly. According to Aparna Pappu, the general manager and VP of Workspace, Google users have long been trying to hack Gemini to do complicated, multi-app things: send an email based on the data they’re looking at in Sheets or add a reminder to respond to the email they were currently looking at. And since Gemini has access to all of your documents, emails, and files, it can answer questions without forcing you to switch apps.

Google is fighting OpenAI with Project Astra, and Microsoft with this.

Read the full report here.