If Google has its way, your phone and many other Android-based devices will soon no longer need much information from you. At the Android Show: I/O Edition, the company announced Gemini Intelligence, a system designed to automate tedious tasks. In short, Google created a computer user agent (think: Claude Cowork or Perplexity Personal Computer) for phones.
The company says it spent five months fine-tuning its latest agent to make it capable of seamlessly navigating and performing multi-step tasks on some of the most popular phone apps in use today. As you might imagine, Google claims the system is capable of significant feats of automation. For example, the company says the agent can read a course syllabus in Gmail, then put all the books you might need for that course into a shopping cart.
Google adds that the system is even more powerful when it can extract context from your phone’s screen or an image. The company describes a scenario in which users might see a travel brochure at a hotel and ask Gemini to find a similar tour on Expedia.
Understandably, some people might be reluctant to give an AI agent control of their phone. Google says Gemini Intelligence won’t start working on a task until prompted to do so by a user. Additionally, any task that involves Gemini purchasing something on your behalf will require you to confirm the purchase. Users can also decide when Gemini can access their data using Google’s familiar permissions menu, and a progress bar allows users to stop Gemini at any time.
Google plans to first introduce Gemini Intelligence on the recently launched Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones. It will be interesting to see how well people use the system. It’s not like most apps are difficult to use; Rather, over two decades of mobile design, the majority has been streamlined to the point that most of us can perform tasks like calling an Uber without much thought. It will also be notable whether Gemini Intelligence can avoid the mistakes that other IT-enabled agents like Claude Cowork are prone to make. After all, if you can’t rely on the consistency of the software you use, most people are unlikely to use it more than once.