Google Gemini in your mail: personal assistant or digital fantasist?

Imagine a secretary who has read all your correspondence for the last ten years, seen your personal photos, and knows exactly when you usually go to the dentist. Sounds like a plot from a spy thriller, but for Google, it's just another Tuesday. The company has finally released a Personal Intelligence feature for its Gemini chatbot, effectively turning it into a full-fledged agent within the Workspace ecosystem. Now the neural network can do more than just summarize internet articles—it can dig through your "dirty laundry"—emails, notes, and calendar events—to supposedly make your life easier.

Why does Google need this right now? The answer is simple: the arms race in the AI world has shifted from simple chatbots to "agents." OpenAI, Anthropic, and Apple are competing to promise us a future where the computer will book a restaurant table or buy movie tickets on its own. Google has a colossal advantage here because most of us already have our entire lives packed into their services. They don't need to ask permission to enter your life—they're already there. However, the implementation of this idea currently raises more questions than enthusiasm.

Early tests of the new feature by journalists from tech publications showed that Gemini suffers from the same illness it had a year ago—it pathologically cannot admit when it doesn't know something. When you ask the AI to create an itinerary based on confirmed bookings in Gmail, it does so with the confidence of a professional logistician. The problem is just that Gemini might confuse airports, forget about a layover, or, even more amusingly, invent a meeting for you that never appeared 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 is this critical? It's one thing when a chatbot gets wrong the year Napoleon was born—you can check that in a second. It's quite another when you trust an algorithm with planning your work day or, say, the logistics of a complex trip. Errors in the context of personal data cost much more. If the AI reads an email from your boss and misinterprets a deadline, the consequences will be quite real and unpleasant. So far, Gemini behaves like a very energetic but extremely scattered intern: he's ready to take on any task, but you need to double-check every comma after him.

Nevertheless, the technology shouldn't be written off. Integration with Google Photos, for example, looks promising. The ability to find "that photo with the blue cake" with a simple request—that's exactly what we've been waiting for for years. But as soon as it comes to logical inference and building chains of actions, the magic of AI runs into the harsh reality of hallucinations. Google is trying to build a "brain" for your digital life, but this brain still too often dreams while awake.

In the final analysis, we have a powerful tool that still requires manual management. Google is betting that convenience will outweigh the risks, and users will gradually get used to the minor flaws of the neural network. But are we ready to forgive the AI for losing an important email or a missed meeting? The question remains open. For now, Personal Intelligence looks like an impressive demo of a future where we still have to work double duty.

The main point: Gemini has gotten closer to the user than ever, but trust isn't bought with integrations. Can Google defeat hallucinations before users lose faith in the concept of an AI assistant?