Google’s Gemini AI is receiving a major upgrade that will allow the artificial intelligence assistant to tap into users’ data across Gmail, Search, Photos and YouTube history to offer what the company is calling “Personal Intelligence”. The opt-in feature lets users decide which apps they want to connect to Gemini.
Josh Woodward, vice-president of Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, said the new feature was designed to “make Gemini uniquely helpful”.
“This marks our next step towards making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful,” he said, adding that Personal Intelligence is being initially launched in the US in beta for “eligible” Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, and only for personal Google accounts.
This is not the first time Google has added some form of personalisation to its AI chatbot. In September 2023, when the chatbot was called Bard, Google announced a way for it to connect to Google’s apps and services in order to retrieve information based on what is stored in a user’s account.
With Personal Intelligence (PI), however, the AI chatbot can analyse information from a Google account, apply reason and come up with answers. This means it can surface details from an email or a photo without the user having to explicitly ask it to pull information from specific apps.
Woodward said Google had “guardrails for sensitive topics”. Gemini aims to “avoid making proactive assumptions about sensitive data like your health”, though it will discuss this information if a user asks.
He also said that Gemini “doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library”, though it does train “on limited information, such as specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses”.
To pre-empt privacy concerns, users are being given control over which apps are connected to Gemini. For example, a user can choose to ignore their search history while opting in their email, photo library and YouTube viewing history. The sheer volume of personal data across Google’s services gives its chatbot an advantage over other AI companies.
