If you sound like an idiot in your work emails, Gmail just built the digital safety net you needed, but it has one big caveat

Google just dropped powerful AI upgrades into Gmail, but there’s a big catch if you want to use them. While the company announced that some of Gmail’s existing helpful AI features are now available to all users for free, the two truly game-changing tools are being locked behind a paywall for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, as reported by Android Authority.

Most of us rely on Gmail every single day. We’re talking about three billion people globally who could use a little help sorting their inboxes and drafting professional replies. If you want to refine your communication and save serious time digging up old information, you’ll need to pony up for one of those premium AI subscriptions.

Let’s talk about the most exciting feature: Proofread. Haven’t you ever hit send on a work email and immediately regretted your tone or realized your grammar was a complete mess? Google heard us. They’re integrating a new AI-powered Proofread feature right into Gmail using Gemini.

This goes way beyond simple spell check

This tool is designed to be your personal editor, helping you refine your written material in terms of word choice, conciseness, voice, and overall sentence structure. If you tend to sound like an idiot when you’re emailing your boss late at night or if you struggle to maintain a professional voice, this is the digital safety net you absolutely need. Notably, if you are looking for translation features, Google has that sorted too.

The second major upgrade is all about finding information fast, and it brings Google’s controversial AI Overviews technology directly into the Gmail search bar. In the regular Google Search engine, these overviews have been controversial because they’re prone to “hallucination,” meaning they sometimes generate completely made-up facts. Luckily, in your inbox, that risk is much lower. The AI’s knowledge base is restricted only to your actual communications.

Gmail already does a great job of summarizing long email threads when you open them, particularly if you have dozens of replies in a single conversation. Now, that power extends directly to the search bar. Instead of digging through a large number of emails, AI Overviews will turn that mountain of information into clear answers without requiring you to manually click through every single message. This follows Google’s previous feature drop that started sending you a daily summary email.

You can use natural language queries, just like you would with Google Search. For instance, you could type, “Who was the plumber that gave me a quote for the bathroom renovation last year?” Gemini will scan your emails and pull out the exact summary you need, answering your question directly. Plus, if you ever need to double-check the source of the presented information, you can click on the citations at the end to pull up the original source email.

Since these are premium features, they’re being rolled out carefully. Both the Proofread feature and the natural language search with AI Overviews are initially available only to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. You can expect to see them first on the web version of Gmail, with mobile app support coming at a later date. Right now, the rollout is starting in the US and only in English, but Google says they’ll support additional regions and languages in the coming months.

It seems that if you want the best of Google’s AI tools, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege.