BizTech Q&A 50: Why Can't I Use ChatGPT Tasks in Gemini?

Answering your questions about business and technology

Question

I like to use ChatGPT Tasks and I think that the feature has a lot of potential.  My issue is that I am more of a Gemini user and I don’t understand why they don’t have this feature

~ Anonymous

Answer

Hi Anonymous,

Google (Gemini) doesn’t call it “tasks” but they do have a similar feature that they call scheduled actions.

If you open Gemini and click on the Settings and Help menu

One of the options will be Scheduled Actions

If you go there now, it will likely be empty.  It’s not immediately clear how to actually schedule something (even if you ask Gemini how to do it, it will likely tell you that it can’t).

The way to schedule something is to prompt Gemini to set up a recurring task.  You might have to play with the wording a bit but here is an example of one that worked for me -

Give me a summary of my new unread emails every day at 9:00 AM my local time.

Send me the first one right now and send future summaries starting at 9:00 AM

I wanted one immediately to see if I liked the way that everything was reported.  After I put in this prompt, Gemini gave me a summary of my unread messages and, more importantly, added a scheduled action to the list

If I click on Edit then it brings up a small edit menu

A couple things to note -

• • You must have a subscription to Gemini to use scheduled actions

• • You can only have up to 10 scheduled actions at a time

• • If you use location for an action, you can’t change the location later

Knowing Google, they will add features to this in the future.

Hope that helps!

~ Damien