Use Your Journal with Gemini Personal Intelligence

Google’s Personal Intelligence lets the Gemini app reason across the Google apps you connect — Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, Search, Google Drive, Calendar, and more — to answer in the context of your own life.

Those apps mostly hold records of what happened: mail you received, photos you took, events on your calendar. What they rarely hold is what you thought about any of it — why you made a decision, the doubt you haven’t voiced, the idea from this morning’s walk. That is what an Ayumi journal captures.

Ayumi saves every entry as a Markdown file. Put a copy of those files in Google Drive, connect Drive to Personal Intelligence, and Gemini can read your journal alongside everything else it already knows.

Note

This guide reflects Google’s documentation and was checked with the Gemini app in October 2026. Availability, connected apps, and menu names depend on your country, language, and account type. See Google’s About personalization with Connected Apps for the current details. Ayumi is not affiliated with Google and does not upload anything to Google Drive itself — you choose what to copy.

How it fits together

Record on iPhone or Apple Watch
  ↓ Ayumi transcribes and saves
Journal folder in iCloud Drive (Markdown)
  ↓ iCloud syncs to your Mac
Copy entries into a Google Drive folder on your Mac
  ↓ Google Drive for desktop uploads them
Gemini, with Google Drive connected in Personal Intelligence
  → "Look at my AyumiJournal folder in Google Drive…"

Ayumi handles recording, transcription, and the Markdown files. iCloud Drive keeps your journal in sync. Google Drive for desktop puts a copy where Gemini can read it.

1. Decide what goes to Google Drive

Ayumi keeps your journal out of anyone’s account by default. This guide deliberately puts a copy into your Google account, so decide first how much of it you want there.

• The copy lives in your Google account. Once Google Workspace is connected, Gemini can use your Drive as a whole — not only this folder — and anything you add later.
• Entries include their context. The frontmatter can hold location coordinates, place names, and weather. See Markdown Format.
• Copy a subset if you prefer. You can copy only certain months, only entries with a tag, or only the text without audio and attachments.

What Google says about connected data

Read this before you connect Drive

A journal often holds exactly what Google asks you not to connect. Google’s own advice is not to connect apps that contain confidential information you wouldn’t want a human reviewer to see, or that you wouldn’t want used to improve Google’s services. Copy only the entries you are comfortable with on those terms.

The points below summarize Google’s About personalization with Connected Apps and the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub as of October 2026. Read the originals before connecting; they are the terms that apply, not this page.

• Training uses what Gemini derives from your files. Google says Gemini doesn’t train directly on your Drive. But when Keep Activity is on, your prompts and Gemini’s responses — along with summaries, excerpts, and inferences drawn from your files — may be used to improve Google services, including training generative AI models. Google says it reduces personal information first.
• Adding Drive files requires Keep Activity. Google’s file upload help says Keep Activity must be on to add files from Drive. Turning it off stops future chats from being used for training, but those chats are still kept with your account for 72 hours.
• People may read parts of it. A subset of connected-app data — including interactions, summaries, excerpts, and inferences from your files — is reviewed by human reviewers, including Google’s service providers. Google disconnects it from your account first, but the content itself is what you wrote.
• Reviewed data outlives deletion. Chats selected for review are kept for up to three years and are not deleted when you delete your Gemini Apps activity.
• Disconnecting doesn’t erase history. Disconnecting Drive or deleting the files doesn’t delete what is already in your Gemini Apps activity. Activity auto-deletes after 18 months by default; you can delete it sooner.
• Sensitive topics are in scope. Google notes that connected data may relate to sensitive topics such as health or religion, or to confidential information — which describes many journals.

To stop using your journal with Gemini, do all three: disconnect Google Workspace in Personal Intelligence settings, delete the AyumiJournal copy from Drive, and delete the related Gemini Apps activity.

2. Copy your entries into Google Drive on your Mac

1. Use a folder in iCloud Drive as Ayumi’s journal location and open it on your Mac. See Sync with iCloud. This guide uses AyumiJournal as the folder name.
2. In Finder, right-click the folder and choose Keep Downloaded, so every entry is a real file rather than a cloud placeholder.
3. Install Google Drive for desktop and sign in with the Google account you use with Gemini. Your Drive appears in Finder under Locations.
4. Copy the entries into a folder in My Drive, for example My Drive/AyumiJournal.

To copy only the Markdown text and skip audio and attachments, you can run rsync in Terminal. Replace [email protected] with your Google account:

rsync -a --prune-empty-dirs --include='*/' --include='*.md' --exclude='*' \
  "$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/AyumiJournal/" \
  "$HOME/Library/CloudStorage/[email protected]/My Drive/AyumiJournal/"

Run it again whenever you want Drive to catch up, or schedule it with launchd or cron. macOS may ask you to allow access to these folders the first time a scheduled job reads them.

This copies your whole journal

The command copies the text of every entry in the folder, from the first one to today — including entries you might not want in your Google account. Each run also picks up every new entry, so a scheduled job keeps adding to Drive automatically.

• To copy only part of it, point the source at a date folder instead, for example AyumiJournal/2026/10/ for October 2026, and the destination at a matching folder in Drive.
• Deleting an entry in Ayumi doesn’t remove it from Drive. rsync without --delete only adds and updates files. Delete the Drive copy yourself when you remove something from your journal.
• Check the result in Google Drive before you connect it to Gemini.

Tip

Treat the Drive folder as a one-way copy. Keep writing and editing in Ayumi; the next copy brings Drive up to date. Editing files in Drive won’t change your journal.

3. Connect Google Drive in Gemini

1. In the Gemini app, open Settings → Personal Intelligence → Connected Apps. In some regions, Connected Apps appears directly in the menu.
2. Turn on Google Workspace, which includes Google Drive.
3. Gemini may ask you to turn on Keep Activity before it can use Drive files. Check what that means first.

You can disconnect at any time from the same screen. Disconnecting doesn’t delete the Drive copy or your Gemini Apps activity.

4. Ask Gemini about your journal

Mention @Google Drive, name the folder, and give a date range. Entries are organized in date folders, and each file has a created_at timestamp, so dates work well as a filter.

@Google Drive Look at the journal entries in my AyumiJournal folder
from the last seven days. Summarize what I worked on, what I was
worried about, and any decisions I made. Cite the file name for each point.

Because Gemini can also see the other apps you’ve connected, you can combine your journal with them:

You want to	Ask Gemini to
Reflect on a week	Summarize the week’s entries into events, feelings, and open questions
Recall why you decided something	Find entries about a topic and quote the reasoning you gave at the time
Compare plans with reality	Compare last week’s calendar with what you said about those days in your journal
Prepare for a conversation	Gather what you’ve recorded about a project before a meeting about it
Spot patterns	Look across a month for recurring worries, energy levels, or habits

Gemini can be inaccurate or connect unrelated topics. Ask it to cite file names, and open the entry in Ayumi when a detail matters.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to check
Recent entries are missing	Ayumi finished transcribing; iCloud synced to the Mac; you ran the copy again; Google Drive for desktop finished uploading
Some entries are skipped	The iCloud folder is set to Keep Downloaded, so placeholders aren’t left behind
Gemini doesn’t look in Drive	Mention @Google Drive and the folder name; check that Google Workspace is connected and Keep Activity is on
Dates come out wrong	Ask Gemini to use created_at in each file’s frontmatter rather than the file’s upload date

Related pages

• Use Transcripts as Context in Codex and Claude — the same idea with desktop AI apps that read local folders
• Concept — why Ayumi captures what connected apps can’t see
• Gemini API Integration — using Gemini inside Ayumi with your own API key, separate from the Gemini app

Download Ayumi on the App Store