Explore Gemini Personal Intelligence: Powerful Prompts That Deliver Remarkable Results

Published Feb 2, 2026, 4:00 PM EST

Brandon has been involved in tech journalism since the year 2000 and was part of the OG team of XDA and Pocketnow. He's currently a staff writer for MakeUseOf, covering mobile and consumer tech. Brandon likes to help people take full advantage of their technology. 

He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA, with his wife and three kids. When he's not writing, Brandon plays drums and enjoys listening to music. 

He's a graduate of the Villanova School of Business where he got a bachelors degree in finance.

By most measures, Google's Gemini 3 has pulled ahead in the AI race to the point that OpenAI has had to declare a "code red" to catch up. In 2026, Google added a revolutionary feature to Gemini that ingests a lot of your personal data to give you highly personalized answers based on your past email, your entire photo library, the content of your Google Drive, and more.

In testing Personal Intelligence on Gemini (which is totally opt-in and doesn't use your data to train the main model), I've come across a handful of mind-blowing queries that have been insanely helpful and have saved me a ton of time.

How to get Gemini Personal Intelligence

Only available to Pro and Ultra customers for now

I bought new Pixel 10 Pro, and included with my purchase was a free year of Gemini Pro (and Google gives out free trials of Gemini Pro with the purchase of almost anything from the Google Store), it's a $20 per month fee. Right now, Personal Intelligence is only available to Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra subscribers, but Google says it'll be available to all users, including free users, later in 2026. You can pick your Gemini subscription here if you want to be able to use Personal Intelligence today. Personal Intelligence is off by default, so you must enable it and opt in for it to begin working.

Here's a full list of the data Gemini Personal Intelligence will ingest:

• Past Gemini Chats
• All of Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Keep, Tasks)
• Google Photos
• Google Search
• YouTube & YouTube Music
• Google Home
• Spotify
• OpenStax
• SynthID

In addition to the above data sources, Personal Intelligence lets you give Gemini specific instructions on how you want it to respond. For example, you can ask it to respond in concise bullet points instead of presenting long paragraphs, or you can ask it to use a direct tone without sugarcoating if you want Gemini to stress-test your ideas.

Here's what Personal Intelligence can really do

Gemini has deep knowledge of your preferences and behaviors

It's not often technology makes me sit back in my chair and say "Wow!" but Gemini Personal Intelligence has done just that just because its sheer comprehensive access to my data, allowing it to give me answers to questions that otherwise might take me minutes to find, but Gemini finds it in seconds. Let me give you a few such examples — while I'm using a web browser on PC to run these queries, you can also do them from the Gemini app (which can be quickly invoked with the Action Button on iPhone, or with a variety of methods on Android, like a swipe gesture).

You can turn on Personal Intelligence by going to Gemini -> tap your Avatar -> tap Personal Intelligence. Then you will be walked through the configuration options.

What is my wife's license plate number?

This is amazing. For Gemini to find my wife's license plate, it must know who my wife is, it must know what car she drives, it must be able to identify her car in my Google Photos library (which can make amazing collages), then it must find a photo that has her license plate, read the plate, then report the number to me. And it does just that! For me to do this manually would probably take several minutes of searching, but with Gemini Personal Intelligence, the answer comes up in seconds.

What was I doing on [date]?

Gemini can look up where you were, the photos you took, and the things you searched for to string together a summary of what you were doing on that date. This is especially helpful if you're like me and can't remember what you did on a particular day in the past. It's particularly interesting because Gemini can analyze the photos you take, and, for example, say, "on Dec 21, 2023, you were with your son at home decorating the Christmas tree." It's super cool.

When am I going to the circus [or other event], and what are my seats?

From the email, Gemini knows I recently bought circus tickets. It can find that email, extract the details about when and where it is, and even tell me the seats. This works well for flights, events, invitations, and more: with Gemini, you can give it access to your email, and it can go back and find details from upcoming events without you having to search through or read dozens of emails. It's a huge time-saver.

Related

Gemini's newest feature is going to make it a whole lot more usable

A new "Answer now" option skips in-depth thinking for faster answers

You're giving a lot of data to Google, but it's worth it

As mentioned, Personal Intelligence is optional; you must opt in. And if you do, Google says it will not use any of your data to train the main Gemini model. And I believe them, because overall, I trust Google (despite the fact that they use your data to customize ads for you). The convenience of Google ingesting all of my email, photos, and other data is a major convenience that supercharges Gemini and lets it do things that are almost science fiction.

Google Gemini

Google Gemini is the app for Google's AI assistant, Gemini, that helps you write, learn, plan and create.