How to use Gemini AI to write (and rewrite) in Google Docs and Gmail

Whether you’re a professional writer or someone who dreads having to compose documents or emails for your job, the potential of AI assistance for your writing tasks is appealing. Powered by Gemini, Google’s generative AI platform, the Help Me Write tool in Google Docs and Gmail can write long passages of text that are reasonably readable.

It generates written text based on prompts (instructions) that you give it, which can give you a significant head start on any writing tasks. But its results come with caveats that may include factual errors, redundancy, and too-generic prose. And it’s never a good idea to use private or proprietary data when working with any generative AI tool.

This guide covers how to use Help Me Write in both Google Docs and Gmail to generate and rewrite text, and how to overcome some of the tool’s shortcomings.

Who can use Help Me Write?

If you have a Google Workspace account, the Gemini AI tools that include Help Me Write are available as part of your subscription. If you have a Google personal account, you can subscribe to Google One AI Premium to have access to these tools. Or, for no cost, you can sign up for access to Google Workspace Labs with your Google account to be permitted to try out Help Me Write and other experimental tools.

Use Help Me Write to generate text in Docs and Gmail

Working with Help Me Write is very similar in Google Docs and Gmail.

In Docs: To start using Help Me Write in Google Docs, either start a new document or load a document that already has text on it. Along the right of the document page is a vertical toolbar with a pencil icon on it.

If you start a new, blank document, you’ll also see a “Help me write” button with the same pencil icon at the top of the new document.

The “Help me write” buttons (at right side and top of the document) in Google Docs.
Howard Wen / Foundry

Click either version of this pencil icon. The “Help me write” panel will open over your document. Inside the panel, you’ll see several examples of prompts that scroll through, such as “Create a brand marketing manager resume” or “A thank you letter for my job interview.” These are meant to give you ideas as to how to write your own prompts.

Help Me Write provides suggestions for prompts you can ask it.Howard Wen / Foundry

In Gmail: To launch Help Me Write in Gmail, start a new email and click the “Help me write” button (the same pencil icon as in Docs) on the toolbar along the bottom of the compose window. A text entry bar will appear at the bottom of the compose window. This is the Help Me Write tool. Just as in Docs, you’ll see examples of prompts scroll through, such as “A thank you letter for my job interview.”

In either app: Type in a prompt. In Google Docs, we entered, “A step-by-step plan for starting a small catering and events coordinator business as a side gig” to prompt a planning document.

Typing in a prompt for Help Me Write in Docs.
Howard Wen / Foundry

And in Gmail, we entered, “Follow-up to the client recipient asking how satisfied they are with our service, and invite the recipient to respond to me with more questions.”

Typing a Help Me Write prompt in Gmail.
Howard Wen / Foundry

In either app: After you type in your prompt, click Create. Help Me Write will show a “generating” animation as it processes your prompt. This may take several seconds; it depends on how complex the wording of your prompt request is. Then another panel will open displaying the text it generated, which might be sentences or whole paragraphs.

Next you’ll be able to refine the results in various ways, depending on whether you’re in Docs or Gmail.

In Docs: Below the results, you can click Refine. This action opens a dropdown menu that lets you select from the following options to alter the generated text:

Tone: Clicking this opens two more options: Formal and Casual. Help Me Write will rewrite the generated text with wording at a higher academic reading level, or with a looser, more informal style, respectively.

Summarize: Help Me Write will generate a summary of the text based on key points in it.

Bulletize: If you write a prompt asking Help Me Write to generate step-by-step instructions, as we did in our example, it’s likely to create text formatted in a bulleted list. Otherwise, you can select this option to have Help Me Write reformat the text into bullet points.

Elaborate: Help Me Write will generate additional text. But be aware that this may produce redundant wording if your prompt is short or lacks specific descriptions.

Shorten: Help Me Write rewrites the generated text with fewer words.

Retry: If you’re not satisfied with the text that Help Me Write generated, clicking this will instruct it to try again using your prompt.

Custom: Type in a few words to prompt Help Me Write to refine the text in a way that’s not described above — for example, “shorten to 200 words” or “rewrite as paragraphs” — and click the right arrow.

You can refine the generated text before inserting it.
Howard Wen / Foundry

In Gmail: Below the resulting text generated by your prompt to Help Me Write, you can click Recreate or Refine.

Recreate: If you’re not satisfied with the text that Help Me Write generated, clicking this will instruct Help Me Write to generate new results from your prompt.

Refine: Clicking this opens a menu offering the same Formalize, Elaborate, and Shorten options described above.

Gmail offers some of the same options for refining generated text that Docs does.
Howard Wen / Foundry

In either app: If you select one of the refining options above, Help Me Write will generate one or more results. You can scroll through them to consider and compare them with the original passage of text that was generated by Help Me Write.

Optionally, you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon to rate the quality of the text that Help Me Write generated. Presumably, your rating helps to improve future results.

When you’re happy with the text that Help Me Write generated for you (the original or a refined version), click Insert to add it to your document or email draft. After you insert the generated text, it becomes regular text in the document or email that you can edit as you see fit.

Use Help Me Write to rewrite text in Docs and Gmail

You can use Help Me Write to rewrite text in a document or email draft, whether the text was originally written by you or generated by Help Me Write.

In Docs: Highlight the text (phrases, sentences, or paragraphs) that you want Help Me Write to rework, then click the Help me write pencil icon that appears floating over the selected text. A menu opens with Rephrase, Shorten, Elaborate, and More formal options, plus an area where you can type in your own modification prompt.

In Docs, you can have Help Me Write revise selected text in various ways.
Howard Wen / Foundry

After Help Me Write generates new text based on your selected refinement, you can click Replace to overwrite the passages of text that you highlighted in the document with the refined text, or click Insert to insert it right below your highlighted passages of text.

Help Me Write elaborates on the selected text in Docs.
Howard Wen / Foundry

In Gmail: You can use Help Me Write to rewrite your entire email draft — but unlike in Docs, you cannot have it rewrite individual phrases, sentences, or paragraphs.

Open the email draft. Click the Help me write pencil icon on the toolbar. On the menu that opens, you can select Polish, Formalize, Elaborate, or Shorten. Polish is an additional feature here that is meant for making a very rough draft email that you wrote sound more professional, by improving the grammar and sentence structure of your writing.

Help Me Write offers a polish option in Gmail for improving the grammar and sentence structure of an email draft.
Howard Wen / Foundry

After Help Me Write generates a new draft, you can start over, refine it further, or insert it into your email.

What about the Gemini sidebar?

All the Google Workspace apps now have a Gemini sidebar that pops open on the right when you click the Ask Gemini button –the nova star icon that’s right next to your user profile icon at the upper-right corner. In either Docs or Gmail, you can use this sidebar to type in a prompt instructing Gemini AI to generate text. But the resulting text is displayed in the sidebar, which is more difficult to see and work with than using Help Me Write in the body of the document or email.

While the Gemini sidebar does have several excellent uses (which we’ll cover in an upcoming story), it’s not the best interface for generating large amounts of text. In general, it works better to use the main Help Me Write interface for writing and rewriting tasks in both Docs and Gmail.

Use Help Me Write in the Gmail mobile app

Help Me Write is also available in the Gmail mobile app (for Android and iOS), which is handy for composing and refining messages on the go.

When you start a new email, swipe toward the right over the text cursor or tap the pencil icon on the toolbar along the top of the screen. Either action will open the “Help me write” panel, where you can enter a prompt to generate text for your email draft.

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Howard Wen / Foundry

You can also refine the text that Help Me Write generated, or rewrite text that you originally wrote. Tap the pencil icon on the toolbar along the top. This action will open a “Refine my draft” panel along the bottom; it will present the same refinement choices as the ones in the Gmail web app. Tap Polish, Formalize, Elaborate, or Shorten to perform these actions on your email draft.

Keep these caveats in mind and finesse the results

While Help Me Write can give you a head start on your business writing, it’s important to review and edit its output. Here are some shortcomings to look out for in its results:

Generic content: A lot of the passages that Help Me Write generates provide very basic information. Even if you phrase your prompts very specifically, the results may still sound canned.

Help Me Write often delivers generic prose.
Howard Wen / Foundry

Redundant content: Help Me Write may generate text that basically says the same thing as text it generated before. This can happen when you have it generate several paragraphs and then instruct it to elaborate on a specific sentence or paragraph. The additional text Help Me Write generates may read similarly to other passages that it’s already generated for you.

Factual errors: If you prompt Help Me Write to write about subjects that are based on factual information (such as current business analyses or trends) or of a technical nature, you should scrutinize its results. You should conduct further research, searching the web for reliable resources to confirm what Help Me Write has generated.

In addition to fact-checking, you should perform general editing on all the passages that Help Me Write generates. This includes reading through everything, then adding, rearranging, removing, and rewriting text as you feel is necessary. Practicing the craft of editing on the text generated by Help Me Write will help you shape your document or email into a final draft that’s informative and appealing for other people to read.

A useful collaboration tool

Although you can have Help Me Write generate documents or emails from scratch, it can serve you better if you approach it as a writing assistant. For example, you can prompt Help Me Write to assemble a rough outline for a business proposal or marketing plan that you then flesh out with your own writing.

It can also be useful for collaboration — as a brainstorming tool, for instance. Try collaborating with your co-workers on a shared document, where each person prompts Help Me Write to generate ideas for all to build on.

In fact, your interaction with Help Me Write is itself a form of collaboration. You prompt Help Me Write to generate text, its results may in turn give you ideas for how to approach a topic, and you keep working with the AI to refine those results in your final draft — thus, Help Me Write becomes your collaborator.

AI writing is simply the latest tool in the always-evolving working relationship between people and technology. As long as you understand its rules and limitations, Help Me Write can be a valuable aid to kickstart your writing process or refine what you’ve already written.

See more Google Workspace tips and tutorials.

This story was originally published in June 2023 and updated in February 2025.