Google Opens Personalized AI Assistant To All U.S. Accounts

Personalization feature, once limited to paying customers, can now pull from Gmail and Photos for tailored search and Gemini responses — with controls that keep it off unless users opt in.

Google said Tuesday that its Personal Intelligence capability, which lets its assistant reference information across a user’s Google services, is being released to all U.S. personal accounts. The tool, available in Search’s AI Mode as well as the Gemini mobile app and Gemini in Chrome, had previously been restricted to subscribers; the company says free-tier users in the United States will begin seeing the feature. Users must enable the setting themselves — it is not activated by default.

The feature links the assistant’s answers to signals from services such as Gmail and Google Photos, offering responses that reflect items in a person’s account. Google provided scenarios to show how this might work: instead of giving a generic product suggestion, the assistant can match a replacement to a previously purchased item logged in your email receipts; when planning a trip it can recommend activities based on earlier vacation photos and booking confirmations. I imagined other uses: a user could get help assembling a checklist for a family trip by pulling flight and hotel details from messages, or be reminded which model of a gadget they own by referencing a stored receipt photo.

Google emphasizes that Gemini doesn’t absorb entire inboxes or photo libraries into its base training corpus. Rather, the system uses prompts you give in Gemini or AI Mode and the assistant’s replies to improve those interactions, according to the company. Personal Intelligence’s data access is limited to personal Google accounts; business, education and enterprise Workspace profiles are excluded from these experiences for now.

Privacy advocates say features that aggregate across services raise legitimate questions, even if opt-in defaults and account limits reduce risk. A privacy researcher at a university I spoke with noted the trade-off: the convenience of contextual answers versus the importance of clear controls and auditability. Google’s rollout will be watched by regulators weighing how consumer-facing AI handles personal data.

The expansion begins immediately in Search’s AI Mode and will appear progressively in the Gemini app and Chrome extension for U.S. personal users. Google says account-level settings let people decide when to connect apps to the assistant, and that broader availability to organizations is not part of this release.