Gmail's Help me write drafts and refines email with Gemini, free, inside Google's own apps. OpenCues works in Gmail too, through its Chrome integration, and then keeps working everywhere else you type, on whichever model you choose.
What Help me write does well
Zero setup for billions of accounts, decent drafts, and refine chips right in the compose window. Inside Gmail it is the path of least resistance.
Where Help me write struggles
Granularity and walls. It drafts and refines at the whole-message level, you keep or discard the block it inserts, and it never leaves Google's apps or Google's model. Nothing carries over to the rest of your typing life: the terminal, other sites, other editors.
By the numbers
Four steps to a draft (button, prompt, Create, Insert) and three to refine, against one for either with OpenCues; Smart Compose's ghost text does give Gmail a one-Tab passive layer. Once inserted, a draft is keep-or-discard whole. Counts and sequences in the full comparison.
How OpenCues differs
Walls and models. Help me write ends at Google's apps and only speaks Gemini. OpenCues is app-agnostic and provider-agnostic: the same _ that drafts an email in Gmail compose answers questions in a terminal and rewrites text in a coding agent, on ten providers, your existing AI plan, or local Ollama. Open source, Apache-2.0.
Help me write inserts a draft you keep or discard whole; OpenCues edits are revertable per word, and identity values are tokenised before any cloud call.
OpenCues is also extensible by design: cues and blanks are markdown files you write yourself, and blanks can bind shell scripts or runtime classes, all under an open standard anyone can implement. See write your own cue and write your own blank.
Related: Full comparison · OpenCues on Gmail · Help me write