Gemini with personal intelligence is very familiar

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because Gemini is already a show Option to link to your Workspace applications. But it requires a little more work on the user’s part – I’ve always found that I need to explicitly ask them to check something in my email or on my calendar if I want to use them as sources. Now, if the prompt sounds like it’s worth going to your inbox for an email about a concert ticket, it will do so on its own. This is kind of huge. If you have to be specific with every prompt and patronize AI, it’s no more useful than the timer-setting robotic assistants we’ve been using for the past decade.

Gemini offers some suggested prompts to try once you enable Personal Intelligence, such as having it recommend books you might like based on your interests. The titles you suggested to me were annoyingly out of place. Another one of these conversations led to a long conversation with strategies for dealing with the grass in my backyard, which I hate and the crows are breaking up anyway. Gemini offered some native plant options to consider, added reminders to my calendar based on the plan I settled on, and compiled a shopping list in Keep that I could bring to the hardware store. Until a few months ago, Gemini routinely failed when I asked him to complete tasks like “add this to my calendar,” so this is a big leap forward.

The thing is, Gemini gets off his skates in other ways. I asked him to brainstorm some new bike routes, and asked him to include a stop at a café. She responded, and her high-level recommendations were good, although she struggled with the finer details. Trying to pinpoint specific routes was painful; It would give me a link to the route it claimed to have created in Google Maps, but clicking on the map showed me a different set of directions. I’m also not convinced by her plan to send me through the woods on some unpaved paths, culminating in a left turn across several lanes of traffic on a busy road, so I’ll probably stick to the routes I know.

This is 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 him to look up some neighborhoods I might be less familiar with to recommend for an afternoon of photos and coffee (naturally). I have used my personal data to properly confirm that I have previously lived in Ballard and should not be included as a recommendation. The comprehensive list I’ve come up with is solid. The specific sites it recommended were not always correct.

She claimed a South Park restaurant was in Georgetown, said I’d find Café Umbria in the old Rainier Brewery building (there’s no restaurant there), and strongly endorsed a t-shirt store Obviously completely closed Based on their Google Maps listing. I had to do enough fact-checking and recollection that the whole thing was starting to seem like more work than it was worth.

This may be the biggest immediate challenge Gemini faces. A year ago, I needed a lot of babysitting to access the personal information I needed, and I got things wrong regularly. Now, she can do personal things reliably, but getting the details wrong is a very big mistake. You only need to show up once at a vacant storefront to decide you’re done with Gemini. This doesn’t even touch on the privacy aspect of it all. Gemini referred to my husband and child by name in one of our conversations. Knowing that this information is so easy to find by accessing my email and calendar is one thing; It’s another thing to hear their names out loud.

Concerns aside, I think the inclusion of Interpersonal Intelligence has increased the scope of what I’ll use Gemini for – but only slightly, and I wasn’t using it much in my daily life to begin with. I have a schedule for my yard work and a list to take to the neighborhood nursery, where I’ll ask a real human if I’m on track. Maybe doing this initial planning with Gemini is what helps me feel confident enough to get started, even if I end up course-correcting. This is not a bad tool. But you can bet I’ll be watching my step on whatever path you recommend for me.