Google announced Wednesday that it’s launching a new beta feature in its Gemini app that lets its AI assistant tailor its responses by connecting your Google ecosystem, starting with Gmail, Photos, Search and YouTube history.
Although Gemini could already retrieve information from these apps, it can now mull over your data to provide predictive results, such as connecting a thread in your emails to a video you watched. Google says this means Gemini understands context without telling it where to look.
The tech giant notes that this beta experience, called Personal Intelligence, is turned off by default, as users have the option to choose if and when they want to connect their Google apps to Gemini. Of course, not everyone wants AI looking at their photos and YouTube history. If you decide to connect your apps, Gemini will only use Personal Intelligence when it decides it’s useful, Google says.
“Personal Intelligence has two key strengths: reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details from, say, an email or a photo to answer your question,” wrote Josh Woodward, vice president of Gemini, Google Labs and AI Studio. blog post. “He often combines them, working across text, photos and video to provide uniquely tailored responses.”
Woodward shared an example of when he was standing in line at a tire store and couldn’t remember the size of his car’s tire. While most AI chatbots can determine a car’s tire size, Woodward says Gemini can go further by offering personalized responses. In his case, Gemini suggested all-weather tires after spotting photos of a family road trip on Google Photos. Woodward also said he forgot his license plate number, but Gemini was able to pull the number from a photo in Photos.
“I also got great advice on books, shows, clothes and travel,” Woodward wrote. “Just this week, he was great for planning our upcoming spring break. By analyzing our family’s interests and previous trips in Gmail and Photos, he skipped the tourist traps. Instead, he suggested an overnight train trip and specific board games we could play along the way.”
Google says it has guardrails in place for sensitive topics, as Gemini will avoid making preemptive assumptions about sensitive data like health. However, the tech giant also notes that Gemini will discuss this data if you ask.
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Additionally, Gemini doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it is trained on specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses. In the examples above, the road trip photos, the sign image in Photos, and the Gmail emails are not directly used to train the model. They are reported only to generate a response, Google says.
Personal Intelligence rolls out to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Google plans to expand the feature to more countries and to Gemini’s free tier.
Google provided a list of example prompts to try, including “Help me plan my weekend [city i.e. New York] based on things I like to do’, ‘Recommend some documentaries based on what I’ve been curious about’ or ‘Based on my Gmail delivery and grocery receipts, search history and YouTube watch history, recommend 5 YouTube channels that match my cooking style or cooking vibe’.
