Google is launching a major upgrade to Gemini that allows more personalization by giving users access to the entire ecosystem.
Personal Intelligence can use the information contained in GmailPhotos, YouTube and Search to better deal with user queries.
While Gemini already references information from a user’s apps, the latest update is a step forward in that it’s able to reason over complex sources and take specific details from, for example, an email or photo to answer a question. In fact, according to one blog post, it can even combine these to provide “specifically tailored” responses.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Google Gemini, said in a blog post How he used it to buy tires for his minivan while he waited in line at a store Gemini Providing your vehicle’s license plate number via a picture in Photos, providing a description of its specification by searching on Gmail, and even suggesting an all-season tire option based on more images found in photos from a family trip to Oklahoma.
According to the company, personal intelligence will involve sourcing, but it is also possible to request responses that have no element of personalization, with guardrails applied to sensitive topics like health care.
Although some may 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 which apps to connect to, and turn it off at any time,” he said.
He also explained that the feature is not trained directly on user data, but on specific signals and Gemini’s feedback. “In short, we don’t train our systems to know your license plate number; we train them to understand that when you ask for a number, we can figure it out,” he explained.
Like other agentic AI products, this feature has the potential to generate errors through connections inadvertently made between unrelated topics or Gemini’s difficulty understanding nuance or context. To that end, user feedback in the form of “thumbs down” is encouraged.
Personal Intelligence is available in beta for eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra customers in the US with expansion to more countries and a free tier coming soon.
The tool works with the web, Android and iOS operating systems and all models of the Gemini model picker, but it is only being offered for individual Google accounts.
AI mode functionality in search is also promised soon.
