Google Workspace Gemini Skills Tutorial 🛠️

I've shared tips before about using gems to tackle repetitive tasks, but Google is about to get rid of gems and replace them with skills, which is much more the standard across other tools.

And the big difference between gems and skills is that with gems you have one set of instructions and you chat with that gem like a chat that has instructions built in, but with skills you can invoke multiple skills in a single chat.

With Gemini to start with, they're rolling out in Google Workspace and then will come to the Gemini app separately.

And so that means at the moment you need to kind of create them in both places if you want to, but just using them across Workspace is a good place to start.

So let me show you how to.

There's a couple of ways to do this.

The first is in a new Google Doc like this.

In the Gemini box at the bottom that appears you can click on the Tools button and then choose Skill Builder and, and you can just prompt Gemini here to help you get started writing a skill.

For example, you might create a skill that emulates your voice like the tone in which you write and you could ask it to do that here, it might ask you some questions and then it would build a skill that you could then use in Gemini.

Or you can go to Workspace Studio.

Workspace Studio is where we've hosted flows before Automations and now on the left hand side you'll see that there's also an option for Skills you can, when you go there, there are a bunch of pre made skills that you could choose from and use as a starting point.

They are helpful as starting points, but I don't think they're that helpful for you just to add and use as they are.

So always if you're going to choose one, customize it first or you can create your own, which is what we're going to do now.

So I'm going to click on the Create button at the top here and I've got two options.

One is that I can just give the skill a name at the top here and then put all of the instructions for that skill and then in this text box at the bottom.

Or I can work with Gemini in the side panel on the left hand side.

For some reason the only side panel that appears on the left hand side rather than the right hand side across Google Workspace.

But you can chat with it here and it will help you build the skill.

For the sake of this demo, I've actually just got some instructions here that I've already written and I'm going to give it a name.

I'm going to call this one, My Voice like this.

And give it a description as well, And then once you are done and you're happy with the instructions you've put in here, you can just click turn on So once you've created a skill you can invoke it using the key.

It will soon be the forward slash key in Gemini across Google Workspace.

So let me jump over to Gmail here.

I've got this email that I've been sent.

I'm going to click the Gemini button in the top right to open the side panel.

And in the side panel I could say something like draft a reply to this email, but I can type that symbol and you can see my skills get listed here.

And the nice thing is I can select that my voice skill but then also type that symbol again and select the plain English skill.

These do two different things.

The plain English skill is set up to keep my writing simple to read and understand.

And the my voice skill is meant to make it sound more like me or follow my brand guidelines or whatever it might be.

And so I hit submit.

Obviously the side panel has the context of this email.

We already know that.

And it's going to use those skills then to draft the response.

There we go.

It's put together plain English response with some of my things, from the my voice skill like putting thanks Dean at the end.

There are hundreds of different ways to use skills in much more interesting and better ways.

But I hope this gives you an idea of how to get started.

I'll see you in the next one.