Google's latest stab at a virtual assistant sounds incredibly promising: Meet CC

Having a personal assistant has got to be just the best. Knowing that there’s someone always staying on top of your appointments, your obligations, your social invitations, and all the rest just sounds so incredibly freeing — if only it weren’t so prohibitively expensive. Over the past few years, virtual assistants powered by machine learning have attempted to fill that niche for the rest of us, to varying degrees of success. Now a new option has us sitting up and paying attention, as Google reveals its latest experiment.

CC is the newest feature being tried out in Google Labs, and it’s billed as a daily briefing that’s designed to tap into your Gmail, Calendar, and Drive info. From that, it delivers a personalized report highlighting tasks you’ve got coming up, appointments on your schedule, and any relevant updates you’d want to know about.

All that’s pretty straightforward — on top those briefings, CC also streamlines follow-ups for you by helping draft emails and having calendar links ready when you need them. This isn’t just a one-size-fits-all solution, either, and you’re able to respond to CC with details you want it to remember about yourself or tasks you have coming up — it’s just like Gemini itself in that regard, able to recall your preferences.

While none of this really sounds like bold new territory for Google, we have to admit that CC feels like a clever way to connect the dots between a lot of features that Gemini has already offered, and coalesce them into something that’s effortlessly approachable.

Understandably, we’re very curious to give CC a try for ourselves. If you are, too, Google is taking signup requests on its CC waitlist. Early access gets started this week, with priority for AI Ultra users and other paid Gemini subscribers. Hopefully we see that club expand soon, because CC looks like it has the potential to be incredibly useful.