Gemini Beta Previews Proactive Responses from Photos, Emails, and More

On Wednesday, Google announced a new beta feature in the Gemini app that allows the AI assistant to personalize its responses by connecting across your Google ecosystem—starting with Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history.

While Gemini could already retrieve information from these apps, it can now reason across your data to deliver proactive results, such as linking a thread in your emails to a video you watched. Google says this means Gemini understands context without being told where to look.

The tech giant notes that this beta experience, named Personal Intelligence, is off by default, giving users the choice of whether and when to connect their Google apps to Gemini. Of course, not everyone wants AI scanning their photos and YouTube history. Google says that if you do connect your apps, Gemini will only use Personal Intelligence when it determines it would be helpful.

“Personal Intelligence has two core strengths: reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details—from an email or photo, for example—to answer your question,” wrote Josh Woodward, VP of 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 of standing in line at a tire shop without remembering his car's tire size. While most AI chatbots can determine a car's tire size, Woodward says Gemini goes further by offering personalized responses. In his case, Gemini suggested all-weather tires after identifying family road trip photos in Google Photos. Woodward also mentioned forgetting his license plate number, but Gemini was able to retrieve it from a picture in Photos.

“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 guardrails for sensitive topics, so Gemini will avoid making proactive assumptions about sensitive data like health. However, the tech giant also notes that Gemini will discuss this data if you ask it to.

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Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets become available. Past Disrupts have featured speakers from Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla — part of over 250 industry leaders driving 200+ sessions designed to accelerate your growth and sharpen your competitive edge. Plus, meet hundreds of startups innovating across every sector.

Additionally, Gemini doesn't train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it trains on specific prompts in Gemini and the model's responses. In the examples above, the road trip photos, the license plate picture in Photos, and the emails in Gmail are not directly used to train the model—they are only referenced to generate a response, Google says.

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

Google provided a list of example prompts to try, including "Help me plan my weekend in [city i.e. New York] based on things I like to do," "Recommend some documentaries based on what I’ve been curious about," or "Based on my delivery and grocery receipts in Gmail, Search history, and YouTube watch history, recommend 5 YouTube channels that match my cooking style or meal prep vibe."