Google is launching a major upgrade to Gemini that allows greater personalization for users by giving it access to the entire ecosystem.
Personal Intelligence can utilize information contained in Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search to better deal with a user’s queries.
While Gemini already references information from a user’s apps, the latest update marks a step forward in that it is able to reason across complex sources and take specific details from, for example, an email or photo to answer a question. Indeed, it can even combine these to provide “uniquely tailored” answers, according to a blog post.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Google Gemini, explained in a blog post how he used it to buy tires for his minivan as he waited in line at a store, with Gemini providing his vehicle’s license plate number via a picture in Photos, details of its specification by searching Gmail and even suggesting all-weather tire options based on more images found in Photos of a family trip to Oklahoma.
Personal Intelligence will include sourcing, but it’s also possible to request responses that have no element of personalization, with guardrails applied to sensitive topics such as healthcare, according to the company.
While some might balk at the idea of giving Google access to this level of data, Woodward said the feature was developed with privacy in mind. “Connecting your apps is off by default: you choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect to, and can turn it off anytime,” he said.
He also pointed out that the feature is not trained directly on a user’s data but on specific prompts and Gemini’s response. “In short, we don’t train our systems to learn your license plate number; we train them to understand that when you ask for one, we can locate it,” he explained.
Like other agentic AI products, the feature has the potential to produce errors via connections inadvertently being made between unrelated topics or Gemini’s difficulty in understanding nuance or context. To that end, user feedback in the form of a “thumbs down” is encouraged.
Personal Intelligence is available in beta to eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Expansion to more countries and the free tier is coming soon.
The tool works across the web, Android and iOS operating systems and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker, but is only being offered for personal Google accounts.
Functionality in AI Mode in Search is also promised soon.