Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar | The VergeSkip to main contentThe homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo.The VergeThe Verge logo.TechReviewsScienceEntertainmentAIPolicyHamburger Navigation ButtonThe homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo.Hamburger Navigation ButtonNavigation DrawerThe VergeThe Verge logo.Login / Sign UpcloseCloseSearchTechExpandAmazonAppleFacebookGoogleMicrosoftSamsungBusinessSee all techGadgetsExpandLaptopsPhonesTVsHeadphonesSpeakersWearablesSee all gadgetsReviewsExpandSmart Home ReviewsPhone ReviewsTablet ReviewsHeadphone ReviewsSee all reviewsAIExpandOpenAIAnthropicSee all AIVerge ShoppingExpandBuying GuidesDealsGift GuidesSee all shoppingPolicyExpandAntitrustPoliticsLawSecuritySee all policyScienceExpandSpaceEnergyEnvironmentHealthSee all scienceEntertainmentExpandTV ShowsMoviesAudioSee all entertainmentGamingExpandXboxPlayStationNintendoSee all gamingStreamingExpandDisneyHBONetflixYouTubeCreatorsSee all streamingTransportationExpandElectric CarsAutonomous CarsRide-sharingScootersSee all transportationFeaturesVerge VideoExpandTikTokYouTubeInstagramPodcastsExpandDecoderThe VergecastVersion HistoryNewslettersExpandThe Verge DailyInstallerVerge DealsNotepadOptimizerRegulatorThe StepbackArchivesStoreSubscribeFacebookThreadsInstagramYoutubeRSSThe VergeThe Verge logo.Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiarComments DrawerCommentsLoading commentsGetting the conversation ready...TechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIGoogleCloseGooglePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GoogleGemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiarThe AI chatbot knows me better — but it’s plagued by the same old problems.The AI chatbot knows me better — but it’s plagued by the same old problems.by Allison JohnsonCloseAllison JohnsonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Allison JohnsonJan 24, 2026, 1:00 PM UTCLinkShareGiftIf you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.I respect Gemini using the royal “we” here.Allison JohnsonCloseAllison JohnsonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Allison Johnson is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple’s business. So last week’s news that it was enabling something called Personal Intelligence felt like a victory lap. Personal Intelligence allows Gemini to reference past conversations and access your data in other Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and search history, without you specifically prompting it to look in those sources. It’s entirely opt-in, and you choose which apps Gemini can access and which it can’t. It’s in beta and only available to people with AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions at the moment.If that all sounds familiar, it’s because Gemini already offered the option to hook into your Workspace apps. But it required more work on the user’s part — I always found I needed to explicitly ask it to check something in my email or on my calendar if I wanted it to use those as sources. Now, if the prompt seems like it merits a trip to your inbox to look for an email about a concert ticket, it will do so of its own accord. That’s kind of huge. If you have to be specific with every single prompt and babysit the AI, then it’s no more useful than the timer-setting robot assistants we’ve been using for the past decade.The titles it suggested to me were annoyingly spot-onGemini offers some suggested prompts to try once you enable Personal Intelligence, like having it recommend books you might like based on your interests. The titles it suggested to me were annoyingly spot-on. Another one of these conversation starters resulted in a lengthy chat with strategies for dealing with the lawn in my backyard, which I hate and the crows are picking apart anyway. Gemini offered some native plant options to consider, added reminders to my calendar based on the plan I settled on, and put together a shopping list in Keep that I could bring to the hardware store. Even a couple of months ago, Gemini would routinely fail when I asked it to complete tasks like “Add this to my calendar,” so that’s a significant leap forward.The thing is, Gemini gets out over its skis in other ways. I had it brainstorm some new bike routes, asking it to incorporate a stop at a coffee shop. It obliged, and its high-level recommendations were good, though it struggled with the finer details. Trying to nail down specific routes was painful; it would give me a link to a route it claimed to have created in Google Maps, but clicking through to the map showed me a different set of directions. I’m also not convinced about its plan to send me through the woods on some unpaved trails, culminating into a left turn cutting across several lanes of traffic on a busy road, so I’ll probably stick to the routes I know.I am delighted that this actually works now.I wouldn’t classify Cincinnati as Rust Belt, but these are pretty spot-on.That’s the problem. Gemini can analyze my interests and make some pretty good guesses about what I’d be interested in; it’s the details where AI gets lost. I asked it to look for some neighborhoods I might be less familiar with to recommend for an afternoon outing to take pictures and (naturally) get a coffee. It used my personal data to correctly work out that I’d previously lived in Ballard and shouldn’t include it as a recommendation. The overall list it came up with is solid; the specific locations it recommended weren’t always right.It claimed a restaurant in South Park was in Georgetown, said I would find a Caffe Umbria in the Old Rainier Brewery building (none exists there), and heartily endorsed a T-shirt shop that is quite obviously closed based on its Google Maps listing. I had to do enough fact-checking and reprompting that it all started to feel like more work than it was worth.It all started to feel like more work than it was worth That might be Gemini’s biggest immediate challenge. A year ago, it needed a lot of babysitting to get to the personal information I needed, and it got stuff wrong regularly. Now, it can do the personal stuff reliably — but getting details wrong is a pretty big bug. You only need to show up once at a vacant storefront to decide you’re done using Gemini. That’s not even touching the privacy aspect of it all. Gemini referenced my husband and child by name in one of our conversations. It’s one thing to know that that information is trivially easy to find with access to my email and calendar; it’s another thing to hear their names out loud.Misgivings aside, I think the inclusion of Personal Intelligence has increased the scope of what I’ll use Gemini for — but only slightly, and I wasn’t using it a whole lot in my day-to-day to begin with. I have a schedule for my yard work and a list to take to the neighborhood nursery, where I’ll ask an actual human if I’m on the right track. Maybe doing that initial planning with Gemini will be what helps me feel just confident enough to get started, even if I end up course-correcting down the line. That’s not a bad tool to have. But you can bet I’m going to be watching my step on whatever path it recommends for me.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Allison JohnsonCloseAllison JohnsonPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Allison JohnsonAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIGoogleCloseGooglePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GoogleHands-onCloseHands-onPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Hands-onReviewsCloseReviewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReviewsTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechMost PopularMost PopularTesla finally kills Autopilot in a bid to boost FSD subscriptionsClaude Code is suddenly everywhere inside MicrosoftWhy this winter storm will likely be a wild oneGoogle won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AISony announces its first turntables in yearsThe Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. 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Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar

The AI chatbot, Gemini, is rapidly gaining ground against competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, exhibiting an unsettlingly accurate understanding of the user’s preferences and needs—a capability that has been dubbed “Personal Intelligence.” This feature allows Gemini to access and reference past conversations and integrate data from other Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and Search history, without explicit prompting. Currently, this functionality is in beta and accessible only to users with AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions.

The core of Gemini’s advance lies in its ability to anticipate and respond with a level of personalization previously unseen. The initial rollout, enabling Gemini to tap into Workspace apps, required users to actively request data access. However, the new Personal Intelligence system operates more autonomously, often inferring information and suggesting actions based on past interactions. This shift is substantial, promising a more fluid and intuitive user experience if it’s consistently reliable.

However, initial experiences reveal a mixed bag of functionality. Gemini’s suggestions for brainstorming new bike routes, for instance, demonstrated impressive high-level recommendations; however, the refinement of specific routes proved problematic, with the AI generating inaccurate Google Maps links and suggesting routes that incorporated unsafe or impractical elements. Similarly, when tasked with identifying neighborhoods for an afternoon photography and coffee outing, Gemini correctly identified Ballard based on its previous knowledge of the user’s prior residence, but subsequent recommendations were frequently off, including one that directed the user to a nonexistent restaurant in Georgetown and the endorsement of a temporarily closed T-shirt shop. This highlights a critical challenge: Gemini’s ability to synthesize information and execute complex requests consistently.

The iterative process of fact-checking and re-prompting to correct errors began to feel inefficient, raising concerns about the practicality of relying on Gemini’s autonomous capabilities. The system’s ability to reference personal details, such as the user’s husband and child by name, is particularly noteworthy, though arguably a natural extension of its data access capabilities. The central issue appears to be a discrepancy between Gemini’s ability to infer and respond based on its broad knowledge base and its capacity to ensure the accuracy of those inferences.

Despite these inconsistencies, the inclusion of Personal Intelligence has demonstrably increased the scope of Gemini’s potential applications. The user’s initial experience highlighted its utility in facilitating preliminary planning for yard work and sourcing materials from a local nursery, activities that could now benefit from Gemini’s contextual awareness—though the need for human oversight to confirm accuracy remains. This suggests that Gemini is most valuable as an initial planning assistant, capable of generating ideas and streamlining the initial stages of a project, with a human to review and validate the results.

The success of Gemini’s Personal Intelligence depends on resolving the current inconsistencies present in its operation. If the system can consistently deliver accurate recommendations and execute complex tasks correctly, it represents a significant leap forward in conversational AI. However, until the user experience becomes more reliable, Gemini may yet prove to be an “awfully familiar” tool—a capable assistant that requires constant vigilance and intervention. This underlines the need for continued development and refinement to fully unlock the potential of this personalized AI.