News Google’s new AI button in Gmail automatically adds events to Google Calendar

[News]

Google has announced a new AI feature that uses Gemini AI bot to add events to your Google Calendar based on emailed details in Gmail.

Emails that Gemini thinks describe events will get a new “Add to Calendar button” that starts the interaction. When you click it, the Gemini prompt sidebar will open to confirm the event was added and, based on a screenshot that Google provides, give you an edit button in case you need to change anything. You could already add events with Gemini’s side panel, but now it all happens automatically.

The feature is similar to Google’s past non-AI features that did things like automatically add or update Google Calendar events based on certain kinds of appointment or travel emails. Google says the change is rolling out now for Workspace for business, enterprise, and education users, as well as to Google One AI Premium subscribers.

The feature did a good job when I tried it, and even identified that there were two separate events in my test email. But it didn’t work exactly as Google described — instead of just saying it had added the event, it confirmed the details and asked if I wanted to add them to my calendar. It added them when I replied with a “yes,” but didn’t provide an edit button in the sidebar. I could click on the event to go straight to it in Google Calendar, so that’s nice.