Google surprised us in January 2025 with the announcement that Gemini, their AI assistant, would be rolling out to all subscribers in Google Workspace Business. Not everyone was asking for Gemini, but Google seems determined to make it stick! We decided to dive in and rank our favorite features based on usefulness to the Newmind team.

Our top 9 Google Gemini features, ranked

 

9. Remove Image Backgrounds

When you upload an image into Google Slides or Google Drawings, you can remove the background of an image by right-clicking, or through the Format menu. It’s not going to come out perfect every time, but it’s a boon for the less photoshop-inclined among our team.

 

8. Gemini Sidebars

Gemini Sidebars have come to almost every app in Google Workspace and it functions as a general helper for anything within the confines of the file you’re working with (it doesn’t draw from the greater internet for information, yet). In Gmail and Docs, it’s great for summarizing the contents of what you’re looking at. In Drive, it can work like a more hardworking search through your files. In Sheets and Slides, it can help you quickly generate a rubric for a new

Basically, it does a little bit of almost everything else on this list. Why isn’t it ranked higher? Well, some of us just aren’t crazy about the sidebar intruding on their work area.

 

7. Write with Gemini in Google Docs

This might be the most generic and expected feature from a new AI tool, but it doesn’t mean it’s not useful. It brings you all the functionality you’d expect from generative writing tools, but it draws from Google’s dataset. We thought the Refine options were a nice touch for folks who might not be great at nailing the prompt on the first try.

 

6. Create Documents with Gemini in Google Docs

“Create Documents” marries the concept of a doc template with the generative writing tool they’ve also added to Docs. You can create a document that’s entirely new, or you can tell it to create something for you based on an existing “target” file in your Google Drive. A few of the recommendations they throw out in the support article about it:

• Proposals
• Project trackers
• Brainstorm documents
• Blog posts
• Press releases
• Campaign briefs
• Menus for dinner parties
• Family newsletters
• Vacation itineraries and more

5. Write a Quick First Draft in Gmail

When you drop generative writing into Gmail, you’re getting basically the same thing you’d be getting from this feature in Google docs, but the context of where you’re using it adds some value—say you want to reply to an email thread with multiple recipients, this can help contour your message to specifically address (or not address) certain members of the thread in the tone of what you’re writing.

4. Summarize Conversations

Does anyone out there use Google Chat for in-office messaging besides Newmind? We’ve never been sure. But we have a handful of evergreen group chats in our office and this is a great way to catch up on them when you haven’t skimmed the conversation in a couple days!

3. Summarize Emails

Just like summarizing Google Chat conversations—this is just a simple convenience for catching up on email threads where you might’ve missed something. Gemini can roll up a summary in a couple sentences, and suggest a reply if you’ve got a case of social paralysis and need to keep a conversation alive.

2. Use Gemini in Drive to Work with PDFs

At a glance this doesn’t seem like much: Gemini can skim the contents of a PDF for you and roll that information up just like the other Summarize tools mentioned above, but we’ve tried to think of Gemini as using CTRL+F on steroids.

Instead of searching a contract for a specific word and skimming through the results for the specific info you’re after, you can just ask the document and it will deliver it to you. It takes a question like “is there language in this contract about penalty fees?”, interprets what you mean by that, and then provides you the answers. Even if it’s a simple photocopy.

On that note, ever needed to copy the text from a PDF into a document for editing? This can peel that text out and remove all of the odd spacing and line breaks. This feature adds so many useful ways to interact with PDFs that we could probably write an entire blog post about it.

1. Take Notes in Meet Calls

Not everyone in our office is so unlucky to be bogged down with meetings, but taking meeting notes is so useful that we’d already been using a combination of other AI tools to do the same thing!

Per Google’s support article, all you have to do is click “Start taking notes” in a meeting. Meeting notes are added to a new doc and shared with people on the calendar invite that are within your organization.

• The meeting organizer and whoever turned on the feature receives an email with a link to the generated meeting notes document.
• The notes document is automatically attached to the Google Calendar event and is accessible to internal meeting invitees.
• All follow ups and next steps will automatically be captured at the end of the notes document in the section, “Suggested next steps”.

 

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