Add Your Comment
As a society, we spend a ridiculous amount of time on reading and writing emails, and though we’ve advanced, emails haven’t exactly kept pace. Today, Google has introduced Compose Actions, a new channel for integrating your other tools with Gmail.
One of Google’s focuses this year has been on making emails easier to write, with Gmail features like Smart Compose. Smart Compose lets emails practically write themselves, offering autocomplete for common words and phrases used when writing emails. The feature has even recently launched on Pixel phones.
As announced on the Google Cloud Blog, the company has created a way for third-parties services to integrate directly within Gmail composition, Compose Actions. These actions are designed to save users the time of having to change tabs, find the file or link they’re looking for, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into their email.
Instead, these Compose Actions, as seen below, will appear directly in Gmail’s compose window near the attachments and Google Drive controls. Like any other Gmail Add-on, Compose Actions need to be installed before they can be used.
To get users started, Google has worked with a handful of third-parties to create commonly used integrations. Interestingly, this includes three Google Drive competitors — Box, Dropbox and Egnyte. All three of these services will be able to embed links to cloud files, and also save received email attachments directly to their respective service.
Atlassian has also created an integration for its Jira issue tracking service, allowing users to quickly browse, search, and link directly to particular issues.
Compose Actions are available for both standard Gmail users and G Suite customers, and Google has promised that more are coming soon.
For developers who are interested in trying out the new Compose Actions API for themselves, Google has provided public documentation.