Google Gemini in Your Inbox: Personal Assistant or Digital Daydreamer?

Imagine a secretary who has read all your correspondence for the past ten years, has seen your personal photos and knows exactly when you usually visit the dentist. It sounds like the plot of a surveillance thriller, but for Google it's just another Tuesday. The company has finally released Personal Intelligence for its Gemini chatbot, effectively turning it into a full-fledged agent inside the Workspace ecosystem. The neural network can now do more than retell articles from the internet: it can rummage through your "dirty laundry" — emails, notes and calendar events — supposedly to make your life easier.

Why does Google need this right now? The answer is simple: the AI arms race has shifted from simple chatbots to "agents". OpenAI, Anthropic and Apple are all promising a future in which your computer books a restaurant table or buys movie tickets on its own. Google has a huge advantage here, because for most of us, our whole life is already packed into its services. It doesn't need to ask permission to enter your life; it's already there. Still, the execution of the idea raises more questions than it inspires delight.

Journalists at specialist outlets who tested the new feature found that Gemini suffers from the same ailment as a year ago: it is pathologically unable to admit it doesn't know something. When you ask the AI to build an itinerary from confirmed bookings in Gmail, it does so with the confidence of a professional logistician. The problem is that Gemini can mix up airports, forget a connection or, even more fun, invent a meeting that was never in your calendar. After the epic failure of AI Overviews, when Google suggested adding glue to pizza, we expected a more cautious approach, but it seems that release speed matters more to the company than accuracy.

Why does this matter? It's one thing when a chatbot gets Napoleon's birth year wrong — you can check that in a second. It's quite another when you trust an algorithm with planning your workday or, say, the logistics of a complicated trip. Mistakes involving personal data cost far more. If the AI reads an email from your boss and misinterprets a deadline, the consequences will be very real and unpleasant. For now, Gemini behaves like a very energetic but extremely absent-minded intern: it is ready to take on any task, but you have to double-check every comma.

Still, the technology shouldn't be written off. The integration with Google Photos, for example, looks promising. Being able to find "that photo with the blue cake" with a simple query is exactly what we've waited years for. But as soon as it comes to logical inference and chaining actions together, the magic of AI runs into the harsh reality of hallucinations. Google is trying to build a "brain" for your digital life, but that brain still daydreams far too often.

The bottom line: we have a powerful tool that still requires manual control. Google is betting that convenience will outweigh the risks and that users will gradually get used to the neural network's small blunders. But are we ready to forgive an AI for losing an important email or ruining a meeting? The question remains open. For now, Personal Intelligence looks like an impressive demo of a future in which we still have to do the work of two.

The key point: Gemini has become closer to the user than ever, but trust can't be bought with integrations. Will Google beat hallucinations before users lose faith in the idea of an AI assistant?