Gemini’s new AI agent is about as good as Google’s demo Gemini Spark, Google’s new AI agent, can perform complex, multi-step tasks in the background, sometimes with surprising accuracy, as demonstrated by drafting a personal email to the author’s wife by inferring her contact and budget details. However, its performance can be inconsistent, failing on some tasks like party planning or requiring workarounds for others, such as creating a missing sign-up sheet. Despite its potential, the high subscription cost, privacy concerns, and the need for constant user oversight make it questionable whether Gemini Spark is worth the investment yet.

• Gemini Spark is Google’s new AI agent designed to perform tasks in the background.
• The author tested Spark by asking it to draft a personal email to his wife about grocery spending, which it completed successfully and with personal touches.
• Spark also attempted to help with block party planning, creating a table of friends and family and a draft email, but also generated an email referencing a non-existent sign-up sheet.
• Spark successfully created the missing sign-up sheet and added its link to the draft email after a delay.
• Other tests included scheduling calendar events, drafting family emails about a TV show, and creating a toddler preschool prep checklist, with mixed but generally positive results.
• Limitations include Spark wanting to access contacts, imperfect color matching for calendar events, missing recipients in emails, linking to trailers instead of episodes, and inability to share generated documents with others.
• The author notes that despite being pitched as autonomous, Spark requires constant monitoring and checking.
• Gemini Spark is only available to subscribers of Google’s AI Ultra plan ($99.99/month) in the US and English.
• The author concludes that Spark is not yet worth the cost or potential privacy risks, especially since the tasks can be done manually, albeit with more time.
• Users need to trust Google with their data for Spark to function effectively with Personal Intelligence enabled. Continue reading https://www.theverge.com/tech/941138/google-gemini-spark-ai-agent-hands-on