Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyenot | Hacker News Reader

Another advantage that Google has is the deep integration of Gemini into Google Office products and Gmail. I was part of a pilot group and got to use a pre-release version and it's really powerful and not something that will be easy for OpenAI to match.

View on HN

Agreed. Once they dial in the training for sheets it's going to be incredible. I'm already using notebooklm to upload finance PDFs, then having it generate tabular data and copypasta into sheets, but it's a garage solution compared to just telling it to create or update a sheet with parsed data from other sheets, PDFs, docs, etc.

And as far as gmail goes, I periodically try to ask it to unsubscribe from everything marketing related, and not from my own company, but it's not even close to being there. I think there will continue to be a gap in the market for more aggressive email integration with AI, given how useless email has become. I know A16Z has invested in a startup working on this. I doubt Gmail will integrate as deep as is possible, so the opportunity will remain.

I frankly am in doubt of future office products. In the last month I have ditched two separate excel productivity templates in favor of bespoke wrappers on sqlite databases, written by Claude and Gemini. Easier to use and probably 10x as fast.

You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.

You say deep integration, yet there is still no way to send a Gemini Canvas to Docs without a lot of tedious copy-pasting and formatting because Docs still doesn’t actually support markdown. Gemini in Google Office in general has been a massive disappointment for all but the most simplistic of writing tasks.

They can have the most advanced infrastructure in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if Google continues its infamous floundering approach to product. But hey, 2.5 pro with Cline is pretty nice.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but there is literally a Share button in Canvas right below each response with the option to export to Docs. Within Docs, you can also click on the Gemini "star" at the upper right to get a prompt and then also export into the open document. Note that this is a with "experimental" Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Docs supports markdown in comments, where it's the only way to get formatting.

I love Googles product dysfunction sometimes :/

I have access to this now and I want it to work so bad and it's just proper shit. Absolute rubbish.

They really, truly need to fix this integration. Gemini in Google Docs is barely acceptable, it doesn't work at all (for me) in Gmail, and I've not yet had it do anything other than error in Google Sheets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com