If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Gemini already offers the option to connect to the Workspace app. However, this required more work on the user’s part – I always found that I had to explicitly ask them to check something in my email or calendar if I wanted them to operate them as sources. Now, if a prompt seems like it deserves a trip to your inbox to look for a concert ticket email, it will do it on its own. This is something huge. If you have to be specific with every command and have artificial intelligence take care of it, it won’t get any more useful than the timer-setting robot assistants we’ve been using for the last decade.
The titles he suggested to me were annoyingly correct
Gemini offers some suggested prompts you can try once you turn on Personal Intelligence, such as recommending books you might like based on your interests. The titles he suggested to me were annoyingly correct. Another one of these conversation starters led to a long chat about strategies for dealing with the lawn in my yard, which I hate and the crows are tearing it apart anyway. Gemini suggested some native plants to consider, added reminders to my calendar based on the plan I chose, and prepared a shopping list at Keep that I could take to the hardware store. Up until a few months ago, Gemini routinely failed when I asked it to complete tasks like “Add this to my calendar,” so this is a significant step forward.
The thing is, Gemini handles skiing in a different way. I asked him to brainstorm ideas for fresh bike routes and asked him to include a stop at a coffee shop. He obliged and his high-level recommendations were good, although he struggled with the minutiae. Trying to map out specific routes was painful; would give me a link to the route she supposedly created on Google Maps, but clicking on the map showed me a different set of directions. I’m also not sure about the plan to send me through the forest on unpaved trails, ending with a left turn crossing several lanes of traffic on a busy road, so I’ll probably stick to the routes I know.
This is a problem. Gemini can analyze my interests and make some pretty good guesses about what I’ll be interested in; these are the details where artificial intelligence gets lost. I asked him to look up neighborhoods I might be less familiar with and recommend them for an afternoon tour to take photos and (of course) grab a coffee. He used my personal information to correctly determine that I had previously lived in Ballard and that I should not provide this as a recommendation. The overall list he has put together is solid; the specific locations he recommended were not always appropriate.
She claimed that the South Park restaurant was in Georgetown, that I could find Caffe Umbria in the Senior Rainier Brewery building (it’s not there), and strongly endorsed the T-shirt shop, which is quite clearly closed based on the entry on Google Maps. I had to fact-check and repeat enough that it all started to seem like more work than it was worth.
It started to feel like it was all more work than it was worth
This may be Gemini’s biggest immediate challenge. A year ago I needed a lot of babysitting to get to the personal information I needed, AND Something broke regularly. Now it can reliably perform personal tasks – but getting the details wrong is a pretty massive mistake. You only need to show up to an empty store once to decide you’re done with Gemini. That doesn’t even touch on the privacy aspect of all this. In one of our conversations, Gemini mentioned my husband and child by name. It’s one thing to know that this information is dead uncomplicated to find with access to my email and calendar; it’s another thing to hear their names out deafening.
Disputes aside, I think the inclusion of Personal Intelligence has increased the scope of what I will operate Gemini for – but only slightly, and I didn’t operate it much on a daily basis at first. I have a gardening schedule and a list to take to a local nursery where I’ll ask a real human being if I’m on the right track. Perhaps pre-planning with Gemini will support me feel confident enough to get started, even if I end up course-correcting in the future. It’s not a bad tool. But you can bet I’ll be watching my steps on the path he tells me.