Earlier this year, Google introduced Personal Intelligence in the U.S. to show how Gemini can make life easier by learning what matters most to you. Today, we’re officially bringing that personalized experience to our users in the Philippines.
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.
AI that actually knows you
Most AI tools today are generic–they know a lot about the world, but not that much about you. Personal Intelligence changes that.
For example, let’s say you’re about to go on a trip to Japan. Instead of starting your itinerary from scratch, you can ask Gemini to “Plan a 3-day weekend in Tokyo based on the places I liked during my 2023 trip,” and it will look through your past itineraries and photos to suggest a perfect new route.
Under the hood, this experience is powered by Gemini 3, and it’s a leap in how the AI understands nuance. Gemini 3 can distinguish between a generic request and one that requires knowing your history, making it significantly more capable than standard chatbots.
How it works, and Google approach to privacy
Google 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[1]. 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.
Google also has 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.
The 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. Google trains on limited info, like specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses, to improve functionality over time.
You can read more about Google’s privacy approach here. At any time, you can adjust settings, disconnect Google apps, or delete your chat history.
How you can help us improve
Google has 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”).
If you previously chose to connect your apps to Gemini, those connections will remain on with limited features, like basic information retrieval, until you choose to connect to the enhanced Personal Intelligence experience. If you start the process of turning on Personal Intelligence, old connections will be turned off. At this point you can choose which apps will connect to Personal Intelligence.
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 activate Personal Intelligence
Google is rolling out this experience over the course of the day to personal Google accounts for eligible Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers. The company aims to bring it to 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.)
