This morning I had a notification that as a Pro user, I can connect ChatGPT with Google Drive, Gmail and more. This service will be incredibly useful. 

You can summarize things from across your Google Drive, do deep research across your Gmail and more.

Let me share my experience in using these connectors.

Searching across Google Drive files to summarize my newsletter

I often want to summarize my writings on a particular topic. What I usually do is upload my last few newsletters into ChatGPT and then ask questions.

Now I can simply connect ChatGPT to my Google Drive and have it sync in real time.

ChatGPT connector

I then prompted,


Find my last 3 AI News You Can Use Newsletters and summarize each story I’ve written on AI Mode.

summarize files from google drive

Because I was using the o3 model, I could see ChatGPT’s thinking process:

o3 thinking process

Wow, this is incredibly helpful:

summary of ai mode writing

summary of what I've written on ai mode

Deep Research across my Gmail

Next, I connected my Gmail to ChatGPT.

I prompted, 

Do deep research across my last 6 months of client emails and list the top 10 questions my clients are asking. Do not mention client names, brand names, emails or any other identifiable info in the report.

(That last line is there so that I can share the results with you.)

questions pulled from gmail

These are just quick uses I thought of this morning, but I expect there are many more interesting things we can do with these connectors. As always, I'll share more on how I'm using this tool in my community, The Search Bar.

What about privacy?

The obvious concern with giving ChatGPT access to all of your Google files and emails is privacy. If you have a ChatGPT Team, Enterprise or Edu account, the information pulled from your connectors is not used for training their models. But, if you have a Pro plan (or eventually Plus when they get this option), they say, "we may use information accessed from connectors to train our models if your “Improve the model for everyone” setting is on."

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