What’s Google Gemini?
Hi everyone, David here. Today we’re going to learn how to use Google’s AI Assistant called Gemini. Gemini is different from other assistants.It integrates with your Gmail, Google Drive, and of course Google Search. And you might be surprised at just how fast it is. Best of all, it’s free to use.You can follow along with our tutorial at Gemini.Google.com. Click the link in the card above or down in the description. Let’s dive in. Here we are on the Gemini
Tutorial Starts
homepage. The interface is very simple. At the bottom of the screen, there’s a text box where you can ask Gemini any question you want. And in the left sidebar, you can use specialized versions of Gemini using the gem manager, access help, set up privacy controls, as well as manage your Gemini settings. We’ll get to some of these later in the tutorial.
Before we get started, I want to call out that I’m using a Gmail account. Some of the things that we try today might not work for you if you’re using a business account. It really depends on how your IT department has configured Gemini. Now let’s try asking Gemini for some real world help. That starts by writing something in this text box at the bottom of the screen.
Note that anything you send to Gemini could be read by a reviewer at Google. And unfortunately, there’s not a good way to turn this off without also disabling chat history. We’ll cover how to do this anyway near the end of the video. Assuming you’re okay with that, let’s make our first request. It’s annual performance review time, and I’m just
1: A Better Annual Review
Really bad at writing a review. In fact, this is what my review looks like so far. Let’s get Gemini to make this better. To do this, I’m simply going to ask Gemini to make this better. Remember, we’re talking to an AI here, not another human. And where a human might need some clarification, Gemini’s got this. To submit your request, press the enter key or click on the send icon in the bottom right hand corner of the prompt box.
Now having used a lot of different AI assistants, I’m impressed by how fast Gemini responds.
Let’s go back to the top and see how it decided to make this better. First of all, it gave us three options to choose from. Option one made the language stronger, saying I made significant contributions. I tackled bugs in our system and so on. Option two gave me a template to expand on. We can copy and paste this paragraph and just fill in the specifics. Option three is like option one with an additional emphasis on the future.
Gemini also summarizes some really good advice for us when writing our review. Stronger verbs, specificity, impact, quantification of results, and tailored to the right audience. Let’s now try another example. Start a new conversation with Gemini by clicking on the new chat button on the left sidebar.
Now that the privacy box has gone away, you can see ideas of what to ask Gemini up above the prompt box. And by the way, any text that you submit to Gemini is called a prompt. So my prompt this time is why do cats purr? Instead of using Gemini for creative writing, we’re using it to seek knowledge. Now let me call your attention to a few
2: Seek Knowledge
Things in the response. First of all, you might notice these little down arrows at the end of each bullet point. You can click on these arrows to find the original source of the information. There could be multiple footnotes here and each source has a number that corresponds to some text in the paragraph. As we scroll down, you’ll see other arrows throughout the answer. And at the bottom, you’ll see a full list of sources. Now here’s a quick tip. Sometimes Gemini will do this by default, like what happened here.
But other times, you need to give it a little nudge. To do that, you can click on the three dots beneath any answer, then click double check response.Gemini then double checks what it just told us against actual sources. And every sentence it can find evidence for is highlighted in green. And just like before, you can click on the down arrows to view the citation.
You can scroll back down to the bottom of the answer and click on understand the results to see the meaning of every color, including non-highlighted text. Pay attention to the peach highlight as it may signify conflicting information. And non-highlighted text just means there’s not enough information. I think you get the idea here. Let’s try a new creative writing exercise by clicking on new chat once again. Did you know that Gemini can create images too?
3: Create Images
Let’s test it out with a following prompt. I want a story about the Kevin Cookie Company, including an illustration. And here we’ve got a quaint little cookie shop and a story to go along with it. The story talks about Kevin’s delicious cookies and also about a young boy named Timmy, who is so inspired by Kevin’s bakery that he grows up and he brings his children to the cookie shop. Just like with humans, Gemini will remember details like this throughout the conversation.
So now that I want to ask a follow up about Kevin and Timmy, Gemini can use the background in the story it’s already created to create a follow up story. It looks like Gemini has taken a dark turn and made Kevin into a bit of a psychopath. We need to fix this right away. When you select an answer that’s part of a creative writing response, a magic pencil icon appears. Click it to make modifications to your selected text. You can make the text shorter, you can make it longer, or you can remove it altogether.
But I’d like to modify it with a prompt. I literally have no idea what this is going to result in. So let’s click regenerate and find out together. So Kevin is now a benevolent AI, like we asked, accessing photos in its database and initiates a gentle smile subroutine. So you can have some real fun with these stories. Let’s go on to another example.
4: Turn Pictures Into Data
I’ve got this picture of this data table, and I need to get the actual numbers out of it. So I’ll right click on it and copy the image. Then back in Gemini, I’ll paste this inside the prompt box using control or command V. And my prompt is simple. Extract the data from this table. And in a couple of seconds, I get the response back. You can export any table of data to Google Sheets using the button in the bottom right hand corner.
You can also further manipulate the data.
For example, you can ask to transpose the rows and columns. Congratulations. You now got a basic sense of how to use Gemini. You can return to any of your past chats by clicking on the history in the left sidebar. While these prompts were powerful, other AIs could handle Gemini Extensions them too. So for this next step, let’s examine how Gemini stands apart. To do this, we’ll check out a concept called extensions. Click on your settings and then click on the extensions menu option.Extensions are like integrations with Gemini.
Turn on the Google workspace extension so Gemini can consider your email, your documents, and your calendar when creating responses. Be aware that your content may be shared if it’s included in a conversation that you share. Then click connect. Once the extensions for Google workspace are enabled, you can call upon any of them by typing the at symbol. In the prompt box, let’s start with Gmail. You can either type Gmail or click
5 – Better Gmail Search
On the Gmail option. Have you ever tried to search for something in Gmail? And no matter how many quotation marks you put inside of your search text, it just never seems to find the right email. You might have some better luck with Gemini. Let’s ask the Gmail extension to find all emails that discuss this training zones topic in depth. Gemini finds several relevant emails, which you can access using the black arrows after each bullet point.
When you click on an email source, it directly launches that message in Gmail. Here’s a slightly different way you can use the extension. Based on my restaurant reservation history, which restaurant might I enjoy going to again? Gemini surprises you sometimes because you see, I’ve been to the pink door before, but I actually haven’t been to Paju or Arroy Maktai food. Those two came from a promotional email, which I would never open.
And it turns out they’re actually on Yelp’s top 100 places to eat in the United States. So we’ll have to check them out soon. Beyond search, you might find yourself asking questions about what emails you need to still address. While I find that Gemini does usually give you a good response, it’s often not comprehensive enough for you to take action on. Personally, I have a tough time trusting that this is all I have to do. Let’s move on to another extension, Google Drive. Just like before, you can summon the extension by typing the at sign, then
6 – Drive Document Summaries
Select Google Drive. Let’s try it for a simple search. I’ll ask Google Drive to list all of my training plan documents and then click submit. And that’s because when I search for the same thing in Google Drive, I get so much more. Later in the video, we’ll go to Google Drive directly and see how Gemini works better in that app. But one thing that’s more useful with Google Drive is if you know the name of a document, you can ask about it.
So I’ve got this paper in my Google Drive that I want to learn more about. And I can ask Gemini to summarize it. And there you go. You get a multi page paper summarized in a single paragraph. Let’s move on to the next extension. It’s time to check out Google Calendar. And I’m telling you, you’re going to be disappointed. You can connect to this
7 – Calendar Cock-up
Extension like the others by pressing the at symbol, then select Google Calendar from the list. When we think of calendar assistance, the basic scenario is scheduling a new meeting. So let’s try that with the following prompt. I want to schedule a meeting with Adele at the following date and time. And I want to add Google Mail. To the meeting. Let’s check out the result of this. It quickly creates the meeting. But is it exactly what we wanted? Click on the meeting button in the response to find out.It created a meeting, but there’s no Google Meet link. And Adele has not even been invited.
It is nice, though, that if you make a mistake, you can always click the undo button here to reverse the event creation. Now there’s one more obvious scenario that you might be inclined to try with accounts. And that’s to ask what’s coming up on your schedule. Now, first of all, you got to love that it’s super fast at getting this information. But be careful. This does not show events from shared calendars. So honestly, I’m going to stick with using Google Calendar directly. There’s one more extension that I’d like
8 – YouTube Summaries
To show you in this section. And that’s one that’s near and dear to all of our hearts.YouTube This is a great tool to get through that podcast backlog that you’ve been dreading with Gemini, you can consume the main points of any video in about 30 seconds. And you might find more information to decide what’s worth watching. And what’s not. I hope now you have a decent understanding of Gemini in action. We’re now going to see how Gemini makes other Google apps more valuable.
Gemini in Gmail
First up is Gmail, you can activate Gemini in Gmail by clicking on the Gemini logo in the top right hand corner of the screen. This opens a prompt box like the one we just played with on the Gemini homepage. Here you can ask similar questions to what we already covered with a Gmail extension. Because of that, let’s close this and look at something else. Specifically, the Gemini experience within a single email thread. This is a promotional email from a podcaster I like.
And if you don’t look hard enough for Gemini, you might miss it. So let me direct your attention towards this summarize email button, click it to reduce any email or email thread to a couple of sentences. Now you’re going to lose the warm and fuzzies of not reading the email. But if you’ve got a lot of unread messages, then this can be a godsend. Gemini also shows up when you compose new emails or reply to existing ones. Through this somewhat innocuous help me write prompt, you can click this area, press the alt H or option H keys, or click on this magic pencil down in the toolbar.
I want to send a thank you note, because this content helped me through a rough patch, you create prompts, just like you have been this entire video. And then you click Create to watch the magic happen. Gemini then drafts an email for you, which you can choose to insert immediately by clicking on the insert button, or you can refine it first by clicking on the refine button. Here you can make the email shorter, longer, or more formal. And the recreate button will make an entirely new draft.
So before you click it, make sure you’re ready to throw the old draft away. As a side note, it might seem like you can edit this directly while it’s inside this temporary state, but you can’t. So we’ll click insert here. Now, instead of writing an email from scratch, if you find that you’ve got an email draft already, and you just need to polish it, have no fear, click on the magic pencil.
Click on the magic pencil icon next to the send button and click on Polish. You can also add another prompt here to modify some part of your original message. And with that, let’s move on to our next app. Here we are inside of Google Drive. Just like with
Gemini in Drive
Gmail, you can chat with Gemini by clicking on the Gemini logo in the top right hand corner of thescreen. Now before we add any prompts here, let me direct your attention towards the summarize this folder button at the top of the screen. Using this button is a great way to get a quick overview of a folder. For example, with this folder, we can see that the files are not just about habit tracking,but also about goal setting. It also includes a sleep log and a collection of stories likea journal.
You can even ask follow up questions about files in your folders. For example, we know there’s a sleep log in here. So let’s ask what’s my quality of sleep. And after a few seconds, Gemini makes some insightful comments. See the document does track restorative sleep length and sleep consistency. So Gemini has inspected the spreadsheet, read through all the data, and then extracted a meaningful set of conclusions without us even opening the file.
Here’s another trick you should know if you click on any file, you’ll see a prompt to summarize this file using Gemini, just like with the summarize this folder button. This is a quick way to get insights from a document, you might notice that the prompt has a file reference inside of it, you can do the same thing with your prompts by using the at symbol.
This list contains your most recent files. But if you start typing, you can find any file in your drive. This was the file we referenced earlier with the Google Drive extension. If you want to use Gemini with your files, hopefully you see it’s just a lot easier inside of Google Drive. Now let’s move on to our last app. Here we are inside of Google Docs. Once again, you can access Gemini by clicking on the Gemini logo in the top right hand
Gemini in Docs
corner of the screen. Immediately, Gemini offers a summary of the content in the document. Now, you don’t have to read all this, I’ll just tell you that this document contains a lot of unstructured interview notes, trying to put together a story of positive culture change on a team. The goal of these interviews was to extract principles that could be used for similar culture change in other teams. We don’t have the principles right now, but Gemini can help us find them.
We can ask it to use the information in the document to create a step by step approach to building culture. In this way, we treat Gemini as a co researcher and as a co author. So now we’ve got phases and steps for each phase. And I have to say I really like this response. And I want to add it to the document. To do that, scroll to where you’d like to insert this information and make sure to put your cursor at the exact spot you want it.
Then you can press the insert button below the response to insert the text at your cursor. You can also use the preview button, which is the eye icon to double check you insert it in the right location. Once in preview mode, you can change your cursor to determine exactly what you want it to be. Then exactly where you want to put the text and then press the insert button in the bottom right corner of the preview window.
Let’s quickly review the remaining buttons. You can choose to copy the text retry generating the result from your prompt or you can choose to retry with Google search. This is useful when you need to reference current information. And as with most responses, you can flag if this was a good suggestion or a poor one. If you use any AI assistant, you might hear that
Gemini Model Overview
there are different models available. Gemini is no different. And you can access different models by clicking on the Gemini 2.0 flash button. And the top of the screen, we’ve been using 2.0 flash for everything in this tutorial so far as a free user. You also get access to thinking experimental and thinking experimental with apps. Different models are good for different situations.
For example, the thinking models will generally give you a higher quality response than the plain flash model. It comes at the cost of speed and some other features might not be available to. Here’s an example of a prompt that would benefit from this new model. Now, while this is working, notice that we chose the flash thinking experimental model with apps. That’s because we need a Google Maps connection and a YouTube connection for this question.
Immediately we look at the response, we notice something different. There’s a thinking section that appears before the answer. This tells you step by step what Gemini plans to do to answer your question. It’s actually what you and I might do to break down a large problem into smaller sub problems. Once you scroll through the reasoning, you can see the answer down below.
We have several suggestions of kid friendly activities along with a YouTube video of one of them. Now, when we were looking at models, you may have noticed that there’s a Gemini advanced. If you choose to upgrade, you get access to a few goodies, including other models. I’ll give you a quick run through of these features so you can see if
Gemini Advanced
they’re right for you. Here we are locked and loaded with Gemini advanced. And when you look at the number of models you have access to, you see quite a few more. In my opinion, 2.0 pro experimental is a better default model than 2.0 flash. According to artificial analysis.ai, it’s of a higher quality than 2.0 flash. And the sacrifice and speed is not that noticeable compared to a lot of other models. The other model that might make the advanced subscription
Deep Research
Worth it is the 1.5 pro with deep research. This is magical if you need to do a lot of research, especially comparing and contrasting different solutions. Let’s walk through one of the suggested prompts to research floor heating for a bathroom remodel. After a couple of seconds, Gemini puts together a research plan. It’s going to find different types of heating systems, then find the brands, and then compare and contrast the brands on a number of different factors, making sure that those brands are available close to me.
Click start research in the bottom right hand corner and the assistant goes to work. Once the research is finished, you’ve got a comprehensive report that’s designed to get you up to speed as quick as humanly possible. Gemini also shows you how many websites it scoured to get all the information you’re looking at. In case you missed it, this report took 25 websites, but I’ve seen an upwards of 200 in my testing.One other value of paying for a subscription is a really large context window.
That’s just the AI way of saying you can send a lot of data. For example, I’m going to upload a giant file. This file has about 50,000 lines of code in it, and I’m going to ask Gemini to refactor it. Now, if you don’t know what this means, that’s okay. Think of it like you just uploaded a massive novel like War and Peace, and you asked Gemini to rewrite it to make it clearer.
After about 30 seconds, we get a response. But you might notice that this file is nowhere near 50,000 lines of code. So yes, you do get a really large context window to run the prompts that you want. But whether it really works for you seems up in the air. To wrap up our Gemini walkthrough,
Make Your Chats Private
You might want to prevent your conversations from being reviewed by Google employees, or used to improve the Gemini service. To do that, make sure that the sidebar is open by clicking on the three lines at the top, then click on the activity button. When you save your activity, that means Google has access to it. While it seems easy to turn it off by clicking the turn off button, this will also disable chat history.
So unfortunately, Google makes you decide what’s more important, your privacy or functionality. To finish the process, click on the turn off button. This makes sure that you understand your conversations will not be reviewed or used to improve Gemini. That is unless you choose to thumbs up or thumbs down responses, you can then click got it to finish the process. After you click got it one more time, you’ll see that you no longer have
Is Gemini For You?
A chat history. So is Gemini the AI assistant you’ve been waiting for? Or is it just another astrology sign? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll see you in the next video.
Prompt
”Create ultra-realistic digital art of a person (use full-reference photo) in a dynamic, full-color outfit (shirt, pants, shoes), appearing stylish and modern. Display a single text ‘YOUR NAME’ displayed vertically, rendered as large 3D block glossy letters in a bold contrasting color. The text should appear only once, without repetition, and be big enough to look like a real object. Make the model interact with the text, for example sitting on it.”