Google Gemini Customization Guide: Settings, Gems, & Connectors Explained

So, here's the deal. Google's Gemini got really good recently with all the updates, new models, and some

best-in-class features. And there's a lot of settings that you can actually change that people are not aware of,

ranging from privacy to telling it more about yourself, and even some experimental connectors that work better

than the OpenAI ones, in my opinion. To get started, it's really simple. All you need is a Google account and you just go

to gemini.google.com and login with said Google account and right there, you're in. This is Google's

competitor to ChatgPT. and the Gemini free models that it uses are basically as capable as what OpenAI has. So now

let's get into customizing your experience. And we'll start with the activity settings. All you need to do is

make sure the side menu is open and here at the bottom click activity. Here they first answer some of the most common

questions in regard to how they manage your data. And then down here you can change things. And here I want to tell

you about one of the biggest obstacles to actually creating a training video on Google Gemini. cuz depending on if

you're a simple consumer with a Google account or you're actually a business user with Google Workspace, what you'll

see here will differ. If you're a consumer, it's simple. You can just change it. If you're a Workspace user,

you'll have to head on to the Workspace settings, admin.google.com, and then here under generative AI and then Gemini

app. As an admin, you can change these settings. You can change things like how long the chats will be stored and if

they should be stored at all. Now, you can straight up turn off the activity settings and it won't keep your chats,

but this does come with a lot of downsides as you can see on the screen right now. Generally speaking, I

recommend keeping this on so you can lock some of these next features that we're about to look at that will help

you customize Gemini. And then you just select after how many months you want the chats deleted, but it does help them

to have there cuz for example, some of the connected apps rely upon these. Next up, we have instructions. And this is a

feature that can be sort of tricky because it does not show up on every single account. I'm on the highest paid

account. their ultra plan here and I don't even have it from a European location. We tried for various accounts

and the US accounts seem to have no problem with this. But if you have this feature, you can go in there and add

various pieces of information about you. This is similar to chat memories just that this doesn't autoop populate just

yet. Maybe you're watching this at a later point in time and it already does. Obviously, if you're not familiar,

memories is the feature in chat GPT that automatically looks at your chat and finds different instructions to put in

here. In Gemini, as of now, you have to manually put in these pieces of information about yourself, and it

really helps. You can do that by clicking this add button. And if you're wondering what to put into here, I would

recommend by starting with the following fields. Some basic data about your identity, your main goals, and this is

critical, why these goals actually matter to you. Your why. This really helps Gemini curate all the information

that it gives you in a way that will be more custom to you. And by giving it your goals and why those goals matter to

you, it will have a chance to connect the dots between what you're asking for today and where you want to go in the

future. And as the whole system is a helpful assistant, it will try to connect that and get you closer to your

goals, which in practice is very useful. And by the way, these instructions can be turned on and off at any time. Now,

these instructions that I showed you span across the entire account, which means that any chat that you open will

include this extra information as context. But Gemini also harbors a feature that I really like which is

called gems which is similar to GPTs and chat if you're familiar with those. If you're not, they're basically specialty

purpose chat bots within Gemini that you create for one purpose. So if I go in here and say new gem, you will see this

simple interface where you can name it. I'll just say email writer cuz that's the simplest example ever. You can give

it a description for yourself. But the main thing are these instructions here. And basically the way this works is you

put in the prompt that you use over and over again in here and then you can use this enhance feature to improve that

prompt to make it a bit more detailed. So there you go. We defined the goals, the behaviors and the rules, the overall

tone and more detailed than what we had initially. And this is a really nice feature that we don't have in apps like

chatblot which compete with Gemini. I really like this prompt improver here inside of the gem. Side note, you could

also add the different context that I just showed you about your identity and your goals into here if it's relevant to

the task that you're trying to build this gem for. One additional thing I'll say is that down here, you can actually

give it specific tools to use. So maybe for this email writer, we don't really need video creation or image creation,

but what we could use is this canvas tool, which is their own version of Microsoft Word, but built into Gemini.

It's really useful when writing emails. But going through all these tools in greater detail would be a separate

video. Finally, you can add extra files from either your drive or just directly upload them as context into the gem. But

that is entirely optional. And if I save my gem, well, now you'll see it appear here on the side at any point in time.

Say what my problem is or what kind of email I want to write, I'll just say coffee machine broken. And as this gem

already holds the email writing prompt plus knows that it should use the canvas, well, it starts helping me in

response to admittedly this very simple input here. And it basically asks me if this is an urgent matter. I say yes,

it's essential. And there you go. It drafts up three different options for an email in the tone that I drafted for.

One pro tip here is if you want to make your gems better over time, then give it the type of information that it asks for

inside of the gem. So here it asks for my manager's name. See that in square brackets. Here it asks for information

about the broken coffee machine. Here it also asks what type of solution would help so that I don't need to put into

the name, but maybe if I have a manager, putting their name into the gem is going to save me work later down the line. And

this is really how you customize AI assistants like Gemini over time. So you don't have to put in the work and it

kind of just works. And then there's one more feature that I want to highlight, but there's no real point of showing you

too much because the reliability just isn't there. And it's their various Google Workspace connectors. So

basically connecting directly to Gmail and Google Calendar. And this sounds so good in theory, right? Your personal AI

assistant just knowing all about your different apps and being able to pull in the data from there by itself. Now, in

practice, this just does not work 100% of the time. It does work better than some of the other connectors I found,

but it being truthful eight out of 10 times is just not good enough when it comes to asking questions about my

calendar in here. Now, nevertheless, you can experiment with it. And I won't even dare to show you the step by step of how

to enable this because we found that depending on your region and depending on if you're a workspace or personal

user and then also there seems to be some X factor that I can't even name where sometimes it just looks

differently, your path to enabling this will be different. For some users, it will be as simple as flipping the switch

on and connecting. For others, you will have to dig into your workspace settings as an admin if you're on a business

account. But the baseline is this. If you enable these features, you will be able to connect to some of these other

apps. And you'll be able to ask something like, "What are the emails I received today?" And then Gemini will

pull these into the chat and you can then work with them uh most of the time. If you're curious about what these

specific connectors can do, you can just click learn more and you'll see what it can do and what it cannot do. So you can

see for Google Docs, it won't be able to create or delete the docs and it can answer questions about the content of

the doc, which is the main thing we want here. Overall, if you enable this, you enable all of Workspace or disable all

of Workspace. They're kind of tied together and depending on your region and account type and subscription level

and whatever other factors, there's a few more apps that could actually show up here over time. I'm sure they'll add

more, but with a few exceptions that are regional, the main thing that this connects to is your Google Workspace. At

this point in time, I would consider more of experimental feature than anything else. Okay, so out of all of

these features, I think that the gems are actually the most powerful one because they allow you to use a

combination of instructions and tools. And over time, they will be developing these gems and you can be developing

these gems. And then as they improve, as they add more features, your instructions will always carry over. So

that's a wonderful thing. As I told you, we were experimenting with different account types. And already they're

showing us a preview of these other type of gems, these Google labs gems that include certain workflows inside where

it's like use their internet browsing tool to research this topic, then turn that into a blog post and then use Nana

Banana, the image generator here to create an image for that blog post. So that's where gems are heading. And once

this really ships to everybody, I'll create a big standalone video on this cuz I think this is the direction that

all chatbots are heading in and should be heading in. little workflows with the various tools and the correct context

included in that rather than one-off tasks where you have to manually manage everything. Heck, depending on when you

watch this video, it might be out already. In that case, I would recommend subscribing to the channel because I

keep featuring and breaking down these new gamechanging features on a weekly basis for you. With that being said, I

hope this overview was helpful. My name is Eigor Pagani and I hope you have a wonderful