Gmail's AI-powered search works well
The Gmail Web interface now standardly1 generates an AI summary for you when you search your email. If you ask or imply a question, it will try to answer it. If you don't, it will give some best-effort information.
The feature is good. I, like many people, instinctively work around new LLM-enhanced versions of features: I've just had too many bad chatbot interactions (e.g.). But seeing exactly what I was looking for, often enough and prominently enough, got me to start trying it out. This meant (i) actually reading the summaries sometimes and (ii) sometimes just describing what I wanted in the search bar instead of trying to optimize keywords or similar.
I don't have much to say about its functioning except that it works: it reliably finds the information I'm looking for, only rarely includes extraneous or inaccurate elements, and links to its source email usefully. The only annoyance is that it pushes some (traditional) search results off the screen or makes them jump around on it.
I'm struck by how strongly I resisted the feature, even though I am a vigorous user of AI and a great optimist about its capacity to make software better. My conjecture is that the many trivial and annoying AI "enhancements" I've seen induced me to put up barriers that kept me from seeing this very useful one. Simply making myself receptive to the feature has been the hardest part of getting value from it (much harder than, say, learning how to prompt it effectively).
I'm sure I'm benefiting from AI all over the place in the software I use, but this is my first experience in which the formula of "here's a feature you know, but now in an LLM-powered version" has yielded something obviously and significantly better. To me, that's a big milestone.2
Perhaps all the time; I think I remember some recent searches that did not yield an AI summary, but I can't reproduce that behavior today.↩
I am, as always, speaking only for myself. Here I am also writing only as a user. As it happens, I did work on search at Google quite a while ago, but only briefly, and (obviously, given the timeline) not at all on anything like this.↩