Gemini can now read the comment threads in your Google Docs, summarise them, write replies on your behalf and suggest edits based on what your colleagues asked for. Google announced the change on its Workspace Updates blog on 28 July, with the rollout starting the same day.
What Gemini can now do with comments in Google Docs
Google groups the new abilities into four things, described in its own announcement as “Gemini-powered comment workflows”:
- Synthesise and Q&A comments: ask Gemini to summarise comment threads, extract themes, or identify unresolved issues. Google’s examples include “Summarize all comments from Sarah” and asking what the unresolved issues are.
- Add new comments: ask Gemini to insert comments on your behalf, such as asking a named colleague to verify some stats, or having it review a document as a copy editor and leave comments on clarity and flow.
- Draft contextually grounded replies: have Gemini generate a draft response to an open comment thread, including pulling in a linked file from your Drive.
- Suggest document edits: ask Gemini to rewrite a section to address a reviewer’s feedback. Google says it generates suggested edits for you to review and approve before they are applied.
You reach all of this from the bottom bar or the Gemini side panel in Docs. Google also notes the feature is currently only available for Google Docs users with edit access on a document.
The part worth reading twice
Tucked into the same paragraph as the access instructions is this: you may see proactive nudges to summarise comments when opening a new document, or to automatically generate a reply when you click into an existing comment thread.
That is the bit to keep an eye on. The four features above are things you ask for. The nudges are things that appear without being asked for, in a place where the alternative — reading what a colleague wrote and answering in your own words — is not exactly onerous. It is the same pattern Google has been rolling out across its apps: the AI is opt-in when you invoke it, and opt-out when it invokes itself. If you find them intrusive, the lever is the Workspace smart features setting, which Google says you must have enabled for any of this to work at all.
There is also a straightforward point about what Gemini is now processing. Comment threads on a shared document are frequently the least guarded writing in a workplace — half-formed objections, disagreements about a colleague, numbers nobody has checked yet. Everyone on the thread wrote those comments to be read by the other humans on the document, not to be fed into a summarisation model by whoever opens the file next. That is not a claim that Google is doing anything improper with them, but it is a change in who and what is reading, and nothing in Google’s announcement describes the other commenters being notified that it happens.
Who gets it and when
Google lists a gradual rollout of up to 15 days for feature visibility, on both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains, beginning 28 July 2026. Availability, per Google’s own list:
- Business: Business Standard and Plus
- Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
- Education: Education Plus, plus the Google AI Pro for Education and Teaching and Learning add-ons
- Consumer: Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers
- Other add-ons: AI Expanded Access
For everyone else, this is a paid feature. Note the shape of that list: comment workflows in Docs are not a Workspace feature, they are a Gemini subscription feature that happens to live in Docs. For admins, Google says the features are available by default if Gemini for Workspace in Drive is enabled, which means most people in a qualifying organisation will get them switched on rather than choosing them.
If you would rather Gemini stayed out of your documents entirely, that admin toggle and the smart features setting are where the decision actually gets made — not in Docs itself.
