At Google I/O this week, Google announced Gemini Spark, which it's calling a "24/7 personal AI agent." The pitch is simple. You brain-dump the small stuff you keep forgetting, and it works on those tasks in the background — on your phone and your computer, even when your laptop is closed.
What it actually does is take one request and split it into separate tasks it can chip away at on its own. In Google's demos, people asked it things like "find all my upcoming meetings with [person] and turn them hot pink so I don't miss them," or "write a note to a new neighbor and invite them to the block party," or "make a checklist of end-of-school-year tasks for the kids, sorted by deadline and priority." It writes using Google Docs formatting, so a checklist comes back as a real checklist. For some tasks it stops and asks you to approve before it does anything, so it won't go and send a message you didn't actually want sent.
A TechCrunch reviewer who tried it called it "actually pretty useful," though they admitted they couldn't figure out why Google made it a separate product instead of building it into the apps you already use.
This is for the small tasks you'd normally drop — the calendar tidy-up, the note you keep meaning to send, the list you never make. An assistant that handles those quietly in the background is genuinely handy if your week is death by a thousand tiny to-dos.
The catches are real, so I'll be straight about them. It's only available right now if you pay for Google AI Ultra, and only in the U.S. It's also brand new, which means the demos look cleaner than your first week with it probably will. If you already pay for Ultra, it's worth twenty minutes to see whether it clears even one nagging task off your plate. If you don't, this is one to watch rather than chase.