Back in June, Google brought its first Gemini-related feature to Forms: one that lets you generate summaries for responses to short-answer and paragraph questions. Now, the company is bringing a small update to the feature to subscribers on Google Workspace Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, Google AI Pro for Education plans, and individual Google AI Pro, AI Ultra, Gemini Business, and Gemini Enterprise plans.
The way the response summary feature worked was that for any short answer or paragraph question with between 3 and 200 responses, you had to navigate to the "Responses" tab and manually click a "Summarize responses" button for each individual question.
Gemini would then take a moment to read the form"s title, the question itself, and all the text answers before spitting out a summary of the key themes.
Google"s update gets rid of that manual "Summarize responses" button entirely. Now, the moment you switch over to the "Responses" tab in a form, Gemini will automatically start generating summaries for any eligible questions.
You can still use the "Retry" button to generate a new summary if you do not like the first one Gemini gives you. All other caveats, like the feature being available on desktop only and restricted to the English language, still hold unfortunately, so you are out of luck if you were hoping for mobile access or multilingual support with this update. The summaries are not saved inside the form either, so you have to copy anything you want to keep.
The update began rolling out to subscribers on Rapid Release domains last Monday, September 15, and Google expects it to take up to 15 days to reach everyone. If your organization is on the Scheduled Release domain, you would have to wait a bit longer, with the rollout starting on October 6.