There's a decent chance you're using Gemini whether you know it or not. Google's ubiquity means that its AI chatbot is everywhere—in your email, in your documents, even in your search results. Whether you're fully onboard the AI hype train, or just trying to figure out whether you can do anything useful with these things, there are a few tricks and tips everyone who touches Gemini should know.
It should go without saying at this point, but chatbots are far from infallible. You should never rely on them to research or fact-check without doing your own work to verify the information they serve up. There's also quite a bit of personal information you should avoid sharing with chatbots—and remember, a chatbot isn't your friend, and it can't provide mental health support.
What LLMs are good at is interpreting natural-language instructions and automating certain menial tasks. It's tempting to think they can replace creative tasks like writing or making art, but if you're considering that, I'd highly recommend taking a close look at any AI's output before implementing it into your workflow. A lot of it can look legitimate at first glance, but turn out to be hallucinated in some pretty career-ending ways.
Understand how LLMs "roleplay" and use it to shape your prompts
One of the most important things to understand with chatbots is that, on a fundamental level, they are roleplaying a conversation. Under the hood, every chat begins with some variation of "The following is a conversation between a user and a helpful chatbot" as the starter text, with the LLM predicting what words might follow. This is called the system prompt. As an example, you can see Claude's system prompt here, though most companies keep their system prompts private. Understanding this dynamic can help explain, for example, why Googling the word "disregard" (briefly) broke the search: Rather than seeing it as a search query like any other, the AI overview saw it as an instruction in the middle of a conversation.
Knowing how this works, you can use this dynamic to better tailor your requests. For example, rather than asking "what is [medical condition]", you could ask "who are the leading medical experts on [medical condition] and what do they say about it?" While the former request might lead Gemini to rely on its own (unreliable) expertise to answer the question, the latter steers it towards guiding you to the people who actually know what's going on.
In Gemini's settings, under Personal Intelligence, you'll find a section called "Instructions for Gemini" (previously called "Saved Info"). This is easily one of Gemini's most useful superpowers, as it allows you to create custom instructions that any future chat will refer to.
For example, did that "medical experts" request from the last section sound a bit too wordy? Well, you can make a custom instruction asking the chatbot to cite experts every time. You can even create one-word commands to invoke much longer instructions. I've used this in the past to, say, instruct Gemini to convert all subheadings in a document to H2s, by simply typing "H2s".
Use “Gems” to create custom Gemini chatbots for emailing specific people
Similar to custom instructions, Gemini allows you to create "Gems," which are essentially siloed versions of the chatbot with their own specific instructions. This is helpful if you want to talk to a chatbot for a specific purpose, but don't want every conversation you ever have with Gemini to follow those instructions.
For example, you could create a Gem that handles helping you email your boss, with custom instructions for those hyper-specific ways your boss prefers things to be formatted (perhaps, say, your boss hates reading paragraphs of more than a couple of sentences).
If you're finding yourself running the same task every day, you can let Gemini run those digital errands for you. Under Settings in the Gemini app, select "Scheduled actions." Here, you can create recurring prompts and choose when and how often they recur. (Keep in mind, results will be sent within an hour of when you scheduled the action, so if you need the timing to be more precise, you might still need to run some tasks manually.)
This tool can be handy for things like getting a daily brief on specific topics or to, say, get an outfit recommendation based on the weather in your area. If you connect Gemini to your other Google services (more on that below), you could also use it to get a summary of your most important emails or events on your calendar.
Add automatic reminders so you don't actually message from the wrong account
One of the most helpful uses of custom instructions is to set reminders or alerts for yourself that can appear in your conversations. For example, if you have both personal and work accounts on your phone, you can set Gemini to add a note to the end of its responses that you're chatting on your work account, so you don't get mixed up.
You can also use this technique to leave reminders for yourself about next steps you should take with the responses you receive. These reminders can also be conditional, such as "if my morning brief includes an email from my boss, add a note that I should remember to take my Xanax before replying."
Fact-checking chatbots is one of the biggest pain points of using them, but you can make it slightly easier by demanding Gemini provide citations and evidence to back up its claims. Typically, instructions like "always cite sources and provide links for further reading" can help. (And this is another good use case for custom instructions, so you don't need to do it every time!)
Google already does a bit of citation-citing with its AI overviews/Gemini results to begin with, but you might notice that sometimes the sources the AI picks are of lower quality than you might find from a typical Google search. To that end, it's often beneficial to specify what kind of citations you want, like Wikipedia articles, scientific journals, or links from respectable institutions in your field. It won't get rid of the need to confirm things for yourself, but it can help you surface sources a bit easier.
Use "Temporary Chats" to keep your conversations more private
Like everything Google does, Gemini collects a lot of data by default. Just like Chrome has an incognito mode, Gemini has its own private mode called Temporary Chats. You can see this icon in the top-right of the Gemini app, indicated by a pencil icon surrounded by a dotted line.
When this mode is enabled, chats are private, and you can't get personalized results or save your chats. These conversations are still saved for 72 hours, but won't be available after that. This still doesn't mean it's a good idea to share, say, your personal medical information, but it can be helpful for when you don't want to muck up your search history.
I'll admit, for my personal use, there aren't a ton of tasks I find AI to be helpful for on a constant basis, but one of the rare exceptions is text transcription, which I use constantly. Every time I need to copy text from a screenshot—such as when adding alt text to images online—I'll pull up either Google Lens or Gemini to transcribe it.
I still tend to check to make sure it transcribes text accurately, but as long as a screenshot or image has a pretty clear view of the text, it gets it dead-on the overwhelming majority of the time.
Use Gemini’s “Canvas” to get more control over certain tasks
I don't like letting Gemini (or any LLM) write for me. But Gemini's Canvas is a different beast. This tool gives you a space where you can write (or code), while Gemini sits off to the side, where you can use it to act on your work occasionally, without putting it in charge of doing the work for you. For example, I like to use it to automate formatting changes.
In the time since I started using it, Gemini in apps like Google Docs or Sheets has gotten better at also acting on the document you're working on, so using the Canvas might be a matter of personal preference. but it's still one of the better ways to use Gemini to modify small coding projects.
Use "Connected Apps" to get more accurate and personalized results
This one can be a bit iffy because you might not want to share too much personal information with Google. However, if you're using a work account or an account you keep separate from more sensitive personal info, you can turn on Connected Apps to get more accurate results.
Connected Apps (enabled in Settings under Personal Intelligence) allows Gemini to connect to services like Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, and a lot more, so it has better context for your queries. In some cases, this will be mandatory, like if you want Gemini to summarize your emails at the start of the day. In other cases, it can be a helpful value-add, like searching YouTube to find information to answer a question.
Keep in mind that, by default, your Gemini conversations are used to train Google's AI in the future. So if you have, say, medical records or private photos attached to your Google account, you might want to think twice about sharing it with Gemini.
Hence then, the article about 10 hacks every google gemini user should know was published today ( ) and is available on Live Hacker ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( 10 Hacks Every Google Gemini User Should Know )
Also on site :
- Candace Owens posts photos from trip to ‘unbelievably beautiful’ Moscow
- U.K. Music Tech Firms Face Growth Investment Crisis, “AI Raises Stakes for Gov’t Action,” Study Warns
- The Case for Returning U.S. Public Lands to Indigenous People