Google adds new Gemini features as chatbot race gets personal
Google's Tuesday announcement of several new Gemini features is part of a broader effort by tech giants to make their chatbots more personal by giving them access to more of your data.
Why it matters: Apple and Microsoft have also taken steps to combine the generic knowledge of a large language model with a user's personal data — a move that makes AI assistants both more practical and more of a potential privacy problem.
The big picture: The first generative AI chatbots knew a lot about the world, but almost nothing about the specific person using them.
Driving the news:
Google is making several moves to allow Gemini to access users' information.
What they're saying:
"We feel like we're at the beginning of something that's really, really exciting," Jenny Blackburn, Google's VP of Gemini user experience, told Axios.
Yes, but: Blackburn acknowledges that generative AI still has flaws and says that, in part, is why the assistant always asks a user to confirm their intent before taking action.
Zoom out:
Google's approach to screenshots, especially Pixel Screenshots, is reminiscent of what Microsoft is aiming to do with Recall, the signature feature of its new generation of computers, known as Copilot+ PCs. Microsoft's plan, unlike Google's, is to scrape everything a user sees and store it over time.
Apple's efforts with Apple Intelligence rely on even more personal data, but the company says it has taken extensive privacy measures to ensure that the information is only used in processing each particular request.
Meta is something of a wild card here, as it has a ton of personal information on its users, but has been less clear about what it will and won't do going forward.
