In case you’ve been living under a rock, Gemini is Google’s generative AI assistant. The tech giant is going all-in on Gemini, even replacing Google Assistant on Android phones and tablets. Now, the assistant is going to get much more familiar with you.
Google’s latest Gemini feature is called Personal Intelligence. Essentially, the beta feature lets the chatbot look through your Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube history and Search data to deliver responses that are far more personal than before.
- Read more: What is Google Gemini? Google’s AI chatbot explained
Every assistant under the sun has been promising to understand you better. But they’ve still been delivering responses that sound like they were spat out by a robot. Google’s goal here smarter results for you, based on your actual life. And files.
The examples Google’s offered up are oddly specific, like asking for your car’s tyre size while in line at a shop. Gemini will send back not just the numbers based on the car it knows you own, but tailored suggestions, complete with references to past road trips. Gemini can even pluck a license plate number from an old photo and cross-reference email receipts to confirm the car’s trim level.
Personal Intelligence can also help to plan holidays by skipping the standard list of tourist traps and instead suggesting activities that align with your past preferences. If you don’t like art galleries, you won’t get yet another suggestion to visit one. I’ll concede that this seems rather useful. If AI is going to read my emails, I’d rather it come back with useful tips than just more ads.
It’s not just clever, it’s creepy-clever. It highlights just how much stuff we’ve been feeding Google over the years without quite realising it. But Google does give you full control over the feature.
You have to manually enable the feature, choose which apps it can access, and you can turn it off whenever you like. Gemini also tries to cite its sources when it answers, so you’re not just taking the AI’s word for it. While Google says it won’t use your data to train the model directly, it does feed on your prompts and the AI’s replies, supposedly with a privacy-first approach.
Of course, it’s not perfect. Google admits Gemini can get things hilariously wrong. For example, it might assume you love golf because it found pictures of you at the driving range, when really you’re just there for your son. You’ll be able to let Gemini know when it’s wrong about something, and it should remember this going forwards.
Personal Intelligence is rolling out this week to Gemini Advanced users in the US. You’ll need to have either the AI Pro or AI Ultra subscriptions, and you can’t be using a Workspace account. It works on Web, Android and iOS, and plays nice with all Gemini models. There’s no word yet on a global release or when it might trickle down to the free tier.
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