I put Google's 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it's actually pretty useful | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet. The service was first introduced at Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, where CEO Sundar Pichai joked that Spark, which runs on virtual machines in the cloud, means that “yes, you can close your laptop.” The in-joke here is that he’s comparing Spark to other agentic AI systems, like the ever-popular OpenClaw, which require keeping the machine awake to run its tasks. Spark, he’s suggesting, is agentic AI for the rest of us — those who would rather get things done without nerding out about it by setting up an always-on AI machine. In practice, Spark is still very much designed for work-adjac