If you’ve ever wished Google’s search results could be more customized to your personal life, then this is for you. Google is expanding its personalized intelligence feature to AI Mode in Search, letting you connect your Gmail and Google Photos to make better-informed, more individually tailored answers.
AI Mode is Google’s agentic seach mode, where AI does the searching for you. When you turn on personalized intelligence, the AI can use the information in your email and photos to better prioritize results. For example, if you’re searching for a new sneaker, Google’s AI could use the information in your email and photos to highlight a specific brand you’ve bought from before. It’s an optional, opt-in only feature, as is AI mode. It’s separate from AI overviews, though it does highlight Google’s intention to continue to add AI to its iconic search engine.
The personalization feature is an experimental tool from Google Labs. It’s rolling out now for paying Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US. It’s compatible across the web, Android and iOS versions of Gemini for personal Google accounts (but not Workplace or Enterprise accounts). The personalization feature in the chatbot will be available soon for free and for non-US users.
Gemini has long been able to retrieve information from across your Google ecosystem, going back to 2023 when it was still called Bard. But personalized intelligence helps Gemini use that information and reason. That means Gemini can answer your search queries using the whole sum of your data in Google apps, and it uses that to make more informed, personalized recommendations.Â
For example, if you were to ask Gemini what tires would be best for your car’s specific make and model, the regular version of Gemini would be able to pull many different specs that could work. Gemini with personalization, by comparison, would use the information in your calendar and photos, understand that you have an interest in off-roading or camping trips and add a recommendation for all-terrain tires to the list. This is a real example from Josh Woodward, vice president of Gemini app and Google Labs, who has been using the personalization feature, and he said in a blog post that it’s made his daily life easier.
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The benefit of connecting your Google apps, the company says, is that it can reason across diverse sources and retrieve specific details by “working across text, photos and video to provide uniquely tailored answers.” This multimodal ability is important, since much of the important information in our lives is typically spread out among different formats — PDFs, emails, photos, videos and more. The feature’s advanced reasoning abilities are thanks to Gemini 3, the company’s latest model that was built to handle more nuanced tasks.Â
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This feature is off by default, so you don’t have to worry about Google automatically pulling in data from your other apps. You can decide what Google apps you want to connect to the personalization feature when you initially set it up; for example, you can decide to connect your Google Calendar and Photos, but not your Gmail.Â
Google will not use the entirety of your Gmail inbox or data from other connected apps to train its AI models, but the company can “train on limited info, like specific prompts in Gemini and the model’s responses, to improve functionality over time,” according to the blog post. This is in line with Gemini’s overall privacy policy.
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