Gemini’s new beta feature provides proactive responses based on your photos, emails, and more

While Gemini previously pulled information from these services, it can now reason across a user’s data to deliver proactive results—such as linking an email thread to a video the user previously watched. According to Google, this enables Gemini to understand context without requiring users to specify the source.

The company says the beta experience, called Personal Intelligence, is turned off by default, giving userscompletel control over whether and when they want to connect their Google apps to Gemini. Google acknowledges that not everyone is comfortable with AI accessing personal content such as photos or YouTube history. For those who choose to enable it, Gemini will only use Personal Intelligence when it determines the feature will be helpful.

“Personal Intelligence has two core strengths: reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details from, say, an email or photo to answer your question,” wrote Josh Woodward, VP of the Gemini app, Google Labs, and AI Studio, in a blog post. “It often combines these, working across text, photos and video to provide uniquely tailored answers.”

Woodward shared an example in which he was waiting at a store and could not recall his car’s size. While many AI chatbots can identify standard tyre sizes for vehicles, Woodward said Gemini went further by offering personalized recommendations. In this instance, Gemini recommended all-weather tyres after identifying family road-trip photos in Google Photos. He also noted that when he forgot his license plate number, Gemini retrieved it from an image in Photos.

Image Credits: Google

“I’ve also been getting excellent tips for books, shows, clothes and travel,” Woodward wrote. “Just this week, it’s been exceptional for planning our upcoming spring break. By analyzing our family’s interests and past trips in Gmail and Photos, it skipped the tourist traps. Instead, it suggested an overnight train journey and specific board games we could play along the way.”

Google says it has implemented guardrails for sensitive topics, noting that Gemini will avoid making proactive assumptions about areas such as health. However, the company added that Gemini will discuss sensitive data only if a user directly asks.

The tech giant also emphasized that Gemini does not scan a user’s Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, training is based on prompts entered into Gemini and the model’s responses. In the examples provided, images from Photos and emails from Gmail were only referenced to generate responses and were not used to train the underlying model, according to Google.

Personal Intelligence is currently rolling out to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., with plans to expand to additional countries and to Gemini’s free tier in the future.

Google also shared several example prompts for users to try, including: “Help me plan my weekend in New York based on things I like to do,” “Recommend some documentaries based on what I’ve been curious about,” and “Based on my delivery and grocery receipts in Gmail, Search history, and YouTube watch history, recommend five YouTube channels that match my cooking style or meal-prep vibe.”