Google Docs gets a superpower. This time, AI will handle your colleagues' comments

You return to a document after a week, and thirty comments from colleagues await you in the sidebar. Reading them, understanding what’s done and what’s not, and incorporating everything sometimes takes more time than writing the text itself. This part of the work is now being taken over by a machine: Gemini in Google Docs now reads comments, summarizes them, and directly suggests changes to the text based on them.

This isn’t artificial intelligence’s first foray into Google’s office suite – in June, for example, we wrote about how Gemini in Google Sheets can explain and correct a faulty formula. However, comments are a different discipline. A formula error can be described by a rule, whereas a colleague’s feedback previously had to be read, understood, and translated into a specific edit by someone.

Gemini in Docs has several new capabilities

The company describes four capabilities in its announcement. The first is summarizing an entire comment thread – the assistant extracts the main topics and lists what remains unresolved. You can ask in a natural sentence, such as “summarize all comments from Sara” or “what’s blocking the project according to the comments”.

The second capability is writing comments for you. You give a command like “add a comment asking Roberta to verify the numbers in the readiness section,” and Gemini formulates it. It can even go through the entire text – you can ask it to review as a proofreader, leaving feedback on clarity and text structure.

The third thing is replying to an open thread. According to Google, it can even pull supporting materials from your Drive, so it can insert a link to a specific presentation into the response. And the fourth will likely be the most useful in practice: it rewrites the text itself based on feedback. You say “rewrite the introduction to address Roberta’s comment,” and you get a ready-made edit that you just need to approve and insert into the document with one click.

Google Docs gets a superpower. This time, AI will handle your colleagues' comments Adam Kurfürst News Adam Kurfürst News

The whole thing is launched from the bottom bar or from the Gemini sidebar in Docs. Sometimes it even pops up unprompted – when you open a document, it offers a summary of comments, and after clicking into a thread, a ready-made response.

AI edits won’t go through without your review

None of this gets into the document without you. The assistant doesn’t publish comments or replies on its own and doesn’t touch the text – everything ends with your button confirmation. For a tool that speaks on your behalf in a shared document, this is more of a safeguard than a limitation.

The feature will only appear for people who have editing rights to the document for now – anyone who can only write comments in it won’t be able to summon the assistant for threads. Especially for a text circulated among a larger number of reviewers, this reduces some of its utility.

Who has the feature available?

In a business environment, the new feature targets Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, and Education Plus plans. A prerequisite is that the administrator has not disabled it for the company.

A regular user will be more interested in the consumer branch. There, subscribers of Google AI Pro and Ultra, as well as people with paid add-ons AI Expanded Access and AI Pro for schools, will get access to comments via Gemini. The cheaper of the two main plans costs 549.99 CZK per month according to the official price list.

Conversely, the Google AI Plus plan is missing from the list, about whose price reduction in the Czech Republic we wrote in June. Those paying for the lowest paid tier will have to wade through comments the old way.

Google Docs gets a superpower. This time, AI will handle your colleagues' comments Adam Kurfürst News Adam Kurfürst News

According to the overview of supported languages, the Gemini sidebar in Docs also handles Czech. The announcement does not specify if it will handle Czech comments equally well.

It’s rolling out starting Tuesday, and Google expects it to appear for some accounts up to fifteen days later. This applies to domains with both rapid and scheduled release updates.

Would you entrust colleagues’ feedback to artificial intelligence?

Sources: Google, Android Authority