Google hosted its NEXT Live EMEA event back in March and talked at length about Google Cloud and its G-suite apps. During the event Google also talked about overhauling its Gmail services, which was not reported at the time. The new features for Gmail are: material design, snooze emails, smart reply and smart grouping.
Gmail for web has not changed its looks for a while now and Google displayed a new Material Design UI for it at the event. Gmail’s current UI is not bad and it’s nifty functionalities such as drag and drop file attachments makes it easy to use. The new design is expected to make navigating around the service more better and aesthetically pleasing.
Apart from the new looks, Gmail will also be updated with a couple of new features such as smart groupings, smart reply, and the ability to snooze emails. We have already seen the smart reply feature in Gmail’s Android app. It allows users to send a quick reply to an e-mail which is predicted by the service. The smart grouping feature is similar to the current inbox but allows users to categorise related emails together eg, Trips. The Snooze feature for Gmail allows snoozing or hiding of emails until a certain time period or place.
Both the snooze and grouping features are already present in inbox but they have not been deployed for G Suite and Gmail yet. There is no word yet on when these updates will be rolled out for Gmail.
Google’s Chrome browser has also received WebVR support which enables users to browse the internet using a Google Daydream VR headset. You can read more about it here.