Personal Intelligence securely connects information from apps like Gmail and Google Photos to make Gemini uniquely helpful. If you turn it on, you control exactly which apps to link, and each one supercharges the experience. It connects Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search in a single tap, and we’ve designed the setup to be simple and secure.
Personal Intelligence has two core strengths: reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details from, say, an email or photo to answer your question. It often combines these, working across text, photos and video to provide uniquely tailored answers.
To illustrate how this works, imagine you are planning a trip to Penang for the school holidays. You know you’ve received booking confirmations for your flight or train tickets and hotel stay, but the details are scattered across your digital life.
When you ask Gemini, “what are my travel plans for Penang?”, it goes beyond a simple search. By securely referencing Gmail, it pulls your booking details into a clear timeline. Because it understands your context from Photos, it can retrieve a screenshot you took of a map to a cafe in Georgetown or a photo of a souvenir idea you saved weeks ago. It can even suggest a nasi kandar spot based on a YouTube video you recently watched about where locals eat in Penang - saving you from digging through your history and multiple apps while you’re on the go.
How it works, and our approach to privacy
We built Personal Intelligence with privacy at the center. Connecting your apps is off by default: you choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off anytime. When enabled, Gemini accesses your data to answer your specific requests and to do things for you. And because this data already lives at Google securely, you don't have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience. This is a key differentiator.
You also won’t have to guess where an answer comes from: Gemini will try to reference or explain the information it used from your connected sources so you can verify it. If it doesn’t, you can ask it for more information. And if a response feels off, just correct it on the spot ("Remember, I prefer window seats"). You can also easily regenerate responses without personalization for a particular chat, or use temporary chats to have a conversation without personalization.
We also have guardrails for sensitive topics. Gemini aims to avoid making proactive assumptions about sensitive data like your health, though it will discuss this data with you if you ask.
Our goal is to improve your experience while keeping your data secure and under your control. Built with privacy in mind, Gemini doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. We train on limited info, like specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses, to improve functionality over time.
Here’s what this means in this Penang example. The photos of your souvenir ideas, your booking confirmations in Gmail, and the videos you watched on YouTube are not directly used to train the model. They are referenced specifically to deliver your reply. We train the model using things like your specific prompts and responses, only after taking steps to filter or obfuscate personal data from the conversation you have with Gemini. In short, we don’t train our systems to “learn” your booking details; we train them to understand that when you ask for them, we can locate them.
You can read more about our privacy approach
here. At any time, you can adjust settings, disconnect Google apps, or delete your chat history.
How you can help us improve
We’ve tested this beta version of Personal Intelligence extensively to minimize mistakes, but we haven't eliminated them. You may encounter inaccurate responses or “over-personalization,” where the model makes connections between unrelated topics. When you see this, please provide feedback by giving the response a “thumbs down.”
Gemini may also struggle with timing or nuance, particularly regarding relationship changes, like divorces, or your various interests. For instance, seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son, and that’s why you’re there. If Gemini gets this wrong, you can just tell it ("I don’t like golf").
These areas and more continue to be under active research and improvement. For a deeper look at our methodology, current limitations, and how we’re working to fix them, read this
paper.
How to get Personal Intelligence with Connected Apps
We’re rolling out this experience over the course of the day to personal Google accounts for our
eligible Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers and we aim to bring it to our free users in the coming weeks. Once enabled, it works across Web, Android and iOS and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker. If you don’t see an invitation to try it on the home screen of Gemini, you can turn it on in Settings by following these instructions:
- Open Gemini and tap Settings
- Tap Personal Intelligence
- Select Connected Apps (Gmail, Photos, etc.
We look forward to hearing how you use it.
