Gemini Spark: a useful 24/7 assistant with rough edges

Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you “navigate your digital life” — summarizing your inbox, finishing online to-dos and organizing tasks that would otherwise mean a lot of screen time. Introduced at Google’s developer conference, Sundar Pichai joked that Spark runs on virtual machines in the cloud, so “yes, you can close your laptop.” It’s primarily geared toward work-adjacent tasks through integration with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides.

In hands-on use Spark handled many chores well. For a drugstore trip it found sale items and suggested coupons, though one promo code I tried was invalid and Spark compensated by pointing to buy-one-get-one and rewards deals. For a day-trip packing list it suggested sensible items and even noted that dogs weren’t allowed, but it could not import the list into Google Keep and instead offered a Doc or draft email.

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