Google stores a lot more data about you than you might imagine. This is not only your dialogues with the voice assistant, but also all the dictations, and even the history of your purchases. It's not that the company has somehow carefully concealed this, but you won't be able to get quick access to this information. But one thing is your voice messages, which hardly anyone wants to listen to, and quite another thing is purchases, which sometimes need to be analyzed somehow. So Google decided to add shopping cards to Gmail with a concise collection of up-to-date purchase details.
Gmail is much more user-friendly in the latest update
The cards in question appeared in the latest Gmail update. They are a kind of virtual receipts, where important information about the product is given in a visual form. And it doesn't matter what you bought: an app on Google Play, a subscription to some paid service, a new vacuum cleaner in an online store, a plane ticket or a whole tour. Gmail will automatically analyze the content of the confirmation email, highlight the most important, and present it as a separate card above the email.
Gmail update for Android
The card will always be created, regardless of how the sender prepares the letter. That is, even if the online store where you ordered a vacuum cleaner or electric kettle has a colorful template for notifications about successful ordering, Gmail will still give you its own version. This is how it looks:
Gmail cards are very handy
In fact, cards are a very useful feature, since often online stores and all kinds of online services go too far with the colorful design of their letters. Because of this, firstly, you have to wait until it is fully loaded, and, secondly, to look for the necessary information among the screaming banners and logos. In a Gmail card, as a rule, there is only text information with small nomenclature icons indicating the store where the purchase was made, its cost and delivery date.
How cards work in Gmail
It's the same with tickets or tours. For example, I really do not like how S7 issues its letters about a successful order of an air ticket. I have no idea how they manage to make them so beloved, but every time I happen to use the services of this aviation company, I scold their layout designers for nothing. Gmail itself analyzes the departure confirmation letter and produces the following informative block:
Left – Gmail card, right – layout of a letter from S7
As you can see, cards are applied even to old purchases made before the Gmail update was released, which is very convenient. But, unfortunately, this mechanism does not always work. In any case, the analysis of emails about successful ordering of goods on Ozon and in 'M.Video' by Gmail has not been mastered. Perhaps, the peculiarities of the layout of these letters affected, which is why the postal service was unable to extract important information about purchases from them. But I want to believe that over time, Google will train Gmail to recognize even non-obvious data, and cards will appear even where they were not there before.
Is it convenient? Indisputably. In my opinion, this is generally one of the coolest innovations that have appeared in Gmail over the past few years. After all, even the design of the service, which Google is constantly redesigning, is far from as important as the ability to conveniently consume information from letters. Moreover, the update with cards attracted me so much that I even partially returned to using Gmail, which, as you remember, I had previously abandoned in favor of a bot for Telegram. Perhaps I will not use the service application on an ongoing basis, but I will refer to it to analyze my purchases.