If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Gemini already offers the option to connect to your workspace apps. But this required more work on the part of the user – I always found that I had to explicitly ask him to check something in his email or his calendar if I wanted him to use them as sources. Now, if the prompt feels like it’s appropriate to go to your inbox to check for emails about concert tickets, it will do so automatically. It is very big. If you have to be specific with each prompt and take care of the AI, it doesn’t get much more useful than the timer-setting robot assistants we’ve been using for the last decade.
The titles it suggested to me were annoying
After enabling Personal Intelligence, Gemini makes some suggestions, such as recommending books you might like based on your interests. The titles it suggested to me were annoying. Another one of these conversations led to a long conversation with strategies for dealing with the lawn in my backyard, which I hate and the crows are tearing apart anyway. Gemini offered some native plant options to consider, added reminders to my calendar based on the plan I had set, and put together a shopping list in Keep that I could bring to the hardware store. Even a few months ago, when I asked Gemini to complete tasks like “add this to my calendar” it routinely failed, so this is a significant leap forward.
The thing is, Gemini gets out of their skis in other ways. I asked him to brainstorm some new bike routes, and to include a stop at a coffee shop. It obliged, and its high-level recommendations were good, although it struggled with the finer details. The effort of nailing down specific routes was painful; It would give me a link to the route it claimed to have built into Google Maps, but clicking on the map showed me a different set of directions. I’m also not sure the plan is to send me through the woods on some unpaved trails that will turn left onto a busy road, crossing multiple lanes of traffic, so I’ll probably stick to the routes I know.
That’s the problem. Gemini can analyze my interests and make some good guesses about what I’ll be interested in; It’s the details where AI gets lost. I asked her to find some neighborhoods I might be less familiar with and recommend an afternoon walk to take photos and (naturally) have coffee. It used my personal data to correctly ascertain that I previously lived in Ballard and should not be included as a recommendation. The overall list it achieves is solid; The specific locations it recommended were not always correct.
It claimed that a restaurant in South Park was in Georgetown, said I’d find a Café Umbria in the old Rainier Brewery building (none exists there), and heartily endorsed a T-shirt shop. clearly off Based on its Google Maps listing. I had to do enough fact-checking and re-prompting that it all started to seem like more work than it was worth.
It all started to seem like it was more work than it was worth
This may be the biggest immediate challenge for Gemini people. A year ago, a lot of care was required to obtain the personal information I needed, And Things went wrong regularly. Now, it can do individual things reliably – but getting the details wrong is a huge bug. You only have to walk into an empty storefront once and decide you’re done using Gemini. This isn’t even touching the privacy aspect of all this. Gemini mentioned my husband and child by name in one of our conversations. It’s one thing to know that that information is very easy to find with access to my email and calendar; It’s another thing to hear their names out loud.
Barring misunderstandings, I think the inclusion of Personal Intelligence has increased the scope for which I would use Gemini – but only a little, and in the beginning I wasn’t fully using it in my day-to-day. I have a schedule for my yard work and a list to take to the neighborhood nursery, where I’ll have an actual human being ask if I’m on the right track. Maybe doing initial planning with Gemini will help me feel confident enough to get started, even if I end up improving down the line. This is not a bad tool. But you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on whatever path it suggests to me.
