Google offers users option to plug AI mode into their photos, email for more personalized answers

SAN FRANCISCO– Google is leveraging its artificial intelligence technology to open a new peephole to its dominant search engine to tailor responses based on people’s interests, habits, travel itineraries and photo libraries.

The new option rolling out Thursday will give millions of people the ability to activate a recently introduced tool called “Personal Intelligence” in AI mode, available on Google’s search engine since last year. The technology will first be offered in the United States to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, as well as an option within its experimental Labs division for anyone with a personal Google account.

If enabled, the new tool will connect Google’s AI mode to Gmail and the Google Photos app so the technology can learn more about each user’s life and provide more relevant responses, tailored to personal tastes.

For example, someone might ask for weekend getaway suggestions and get a quick recommendation based on past trips and experiences. Or, in AI mode, the search engine can automatically learn a person’s favorite restaurants or recognize their favorite clothing styles by looking at old photos stored in Google Photos.

“Personal intelligence turns search into an experience unique to you by connecting the dots across your Google apps,” Robby Stein, vice president of Google search, wrote in a blog post. Stein also warned that personal intelligence won’t always provide the best answers, a pitfall that users can help correct by indicating AI mode with words or a thumbs-down symbol.

Enabling this option will force users to trust Google’s search engine to protect the information provided about their lives. But millions of people have already been doing it implicitly for decades, entering sometimes intimate queries into the search engine or sharing personal information in Gmail and the Photos app.

Bringing personal intelligence to Google Search is the latest sign of the company’s ambitions to make its arsenal of digital services even more powerful with the boost from the latest AI model, Gemini 3i, released in November.

Earlier this month, Google took its first steps toward transforming Gmail into an AI-powered personal assistant and now has the chance to play a bigger role in a search engine that remains the foundation of its Internet empire.

Gemini’s tentacles will even extend to the iPhone, iPad and Mac after Apple decided last week to partner with Google to bring more AI tools to those products. The partnership will focus on a long-delayed effort to transform Apple’s often clunky digital assistant, Siri, into a more conversational and versatile aid.

Although Google’s search engine was condemned as an illegal monopoly in 2024 by a US federal judge, it remains the main gateway to the Internet while trying to fend off competitive threats from AI-based response engines offered by emerging innovators such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The potentially revolutionary changes brought by AI helped persuade the judge who called Google a monopoly to reject a proposal from the U.S. Justice Department that would have forced the company to sell its Chrome web browser to curb future market abuses.