Gemini's Task feature can plan your day and sort your priorities

Google's Gemini assistant has a feature called Task that can run your morning routine for you. It sends reminders, pulls together a news brief and reorders your to-do list by urgency. Android Police writer Jade Bryan Jardinico says it has changed how he starts his workday. Task was recently renamed from Spark and requires the Google AI One Pro plan.

What Task does

Task works like an agent inside Gemini. An agent is software that carries out jobs for you instead of only answering questions. Task handles recurring routines and scheduled jobs. It also covers what Scheduled actions can do, such as running a single command. Task goes further and can manage multistep workflows with less supervision.

How the writer uses it

His day begins with a brief that covers curated news, deals he is tracking and a look at his weekly schedule. Task keeps track of upcoming, pending and overdue items and shifts priorities based on urgency. He sets reminders for 8:00 AM and the brief for 8:30 AM so alerts do not pile up in his notifications.

He can also cross off finished items or rearrange priorities inside the chat. Task can find a PDF in Google Drive and open it there. Google also recently added PDF and document creation and editing inside chats.

For news, Task delivers the 10 top stories that arrived overnight. That number can be raised, and the roundup can come as a spreadsheet or document. It is not perfect. It sometimes lists stories he has already read. He says tweaking the routine sharpens the results.

How to set it up

• Tell Task what you do and what your schedule looks like.
• Open Gemini, go to Settings, tap Personal Intelligence, then Connected Apps.
• On the Connectors page, turn on Google Workspace, which covers Gmail, Calendar and Drive.
• Search, Photos and YouTube can be switched on separately.

Skills, which used to be called Gems, are reusable prompt templates. They can be edited after creation, and typing a forward slash in a chat brings up the ones available. The writer made one for his publishing workflow and one for general tasks across other Google apps.

Who it affects

The writer uses a Pixel phone but also a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 and a Galaxy Tab S10 FE. He says the same chat or task is available across them. Google has steadily improved Gemini on non-Pixel hardware such as Samsung. The paid plan is the main hurdle, and the material does not give its price.