📣 Gmail now answers questions about your inbox out loud
Four-minute read. In today’s issue: Gmail answering questions about your inbox out loud, your Xero books inside Gemini, Shopify packing up to 250 orders in one batch, a free photo upscaler, and Tesla’s car that flips in mid-air.
VOICE
Gmail now answers questions about your inbox out loud
What changed. Google began rolling out Gmail Live on 15 October: tap Live in the Gmail app’s search bar, ask a question about your email, and hear a spoken answer with cards linking to the emails it used. It covers paid Workspace Business and Enterprise plans plus Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra.
What it means for you. Finding the one email with a quote, a delivery date or a booking reference becomes a question you ask on the way to a site visit. Nobody scrolls through a thread while driving.
The first step. Open the Gmail app this week and look for Live in the search bar. Ask it for the last price a regular supplier quoted you, then tap the source card to check the answer.
The limitation. It works only in the Android and iOS apps, only for users in the US with English (US) set as their language, and can take up to 15 days to appear. It is on by default wherever Gemini in Workspace is switched on.
Google’s Gmail Live announcement (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
ACCOUNTING
Your Xero books can now answer questions inside Gemini
Xero launched a connected app for Google Gemini on 14 October. It brings live profit and loss, cash position, overdue invoices and unpaid bills into a Gemini chat, with charts such as aged receivables.
Ask Gemini which customers owe you most and draft the chase emails in the same chat. Xero says shared data is used only for that session and is not used to train Gemini, and anything that changes your books needs your confirmation first.
Xero’s announcement (xero.com)
Just shipped
Shopify now lets you fulfil up to 250 orders as one batch: print one pick list, buy every shipping label and print slips together, then scan items as you pack so a wrong item sounds an error tone. Select orders on the Orders page and choose Create batch. (changelog.shopify.com)
The rest of the day
🏷️ Shopify Flow can now buy shipping labels on its own for orders that match rules you set, such as single-item orders or a tag. Start from the ready-made template and switch it on for your simplest orders first. (changelog.shopify.com)
📊 OpenAI’s own figures show weekly users of its task-running tools at EU businesses with 200 or fewer users grew more than eightfold since May. The sample is OpenAI’s Business and Enterprise customers only. (openai.com)
🗂️ Notion rebuilt synced databases so live Salesforce, Jira and GitHub records sit inside a Notion page, with automations running on top. Pull your open deals into the page your team already plans from. (x.com)
📞 Artificial Analysis ranks xAI’s Grok Voice 3.0 first on its speech-to-speech leaderboard, at $0.08 a minute. Ask whoever runs your AI phone answering which voice model it uses and what it costs per minute. (x.com)
🛠️ Built with AI
Min Choi gathered motion-graphic videos people made with Claude Opus 5.5, including a 15-second showreel from a single sentence and a business sizzle reel built entirely in code. Describe your next launch in one sentence and ask for the same kind of short promo before you brief a designer. (x.com)
🧰 The Open Source Toolshed
What it is. Upscayl is a free app that uses AI to enlarge and sharpen low-resolution images on your own computer.
Who it’s for. A shop owner with blurry supplier product photos, or anyone reusing an old logo or event photo at a bigger size.
How hard it is. Download it for Mac, Windows or Linux, drag in an image and export; no account needed.
AGPL-3.0 licence. (github.com)
📈 The AI Odometer
Source: Epoch AI, “AI systems are improving rapidly at Slay the Spire and its sequel”, 14 October 2026, Benjamin Ou and Simon Chen, CC BY 4.0.
Frontier models can now beat Slay the Spire 1 at base difficulty (“Ascension 0”) at least 90% of the time.
What it means for you. Epoch says that six months ago the same models struggled to win at all. Retry one task AI failed for you in the spring, such as reconciling a messy invoice export, before deciding it still can’t do it.
Too early
Xero says Gemini Tasks is coming to its Gemini app, letting customers on eligible plans set up scheduled workflows such as a weekly overdue-invoice check. Xero gives no date and does not name the plans. (xero.com)
🚗 One for the road
Tesla unveiled its new Roadster on 15 October at a SpaceX test site in Texas. Gas thrusters carried it up a ramp that curled upside down, launched it into the air and rolled it 180 degrees to land on its wheels.
The flying version is not approved for public roads, production is planned for 2028, and Elon Musk’s own forecast was that “it will probably work”.
AI video makers did not wait. Within hours Higgsfield had a flying car in a six-star police chase and humbling a drift racer. (cbsnews.com)