Gemini Tutorial

00:00 Gemini updated a lot this summer. The models changed, the drop-down changed, and the pricing shifted right along with them. I'm covering the one you'll actually open today. That starts with your very first login and ends with picking the right model for the job in front of you. By the end, you'll go from zero to running this thing like a pro instead [music] of guessing at settings

00:22 nobody explains. Open Gemini in the same browser where you're signed into Gmail and you're already signed in. Go to the gear icon in the bottom left and open the settings. There are a lot of switches in there. Most of them don't matter. The path from here is identical on free and unpaid. So, open the section called personal intelligence because that's the door everything else sits

00:46 behind. The first thing inside it is instructions for Gemini and that's where you tell it how you want to be talked to and what it should remember about you permanently. Click add and start writing. Mine starts with something boring. I prefer detailed answers with examples and analogies. And that one line changes the shape of every response I get. Then I added what I actually [music] work on and what hardware I'm

01:10 on. An iPhone and a MacBook. That second one sounds pointless until you're troubleshooting something. It stops handing me Windows instructions I can't use. The more you put in here, the less you reexplain later. So treat it like onboarding an assistant instead of filling out a form. Back out one level and you will see personal intelligence is more than that instruction list. It

01:32 bundles three things. The first is your past [music] chats which lets Gemini search what you already ask instead of starting cold every time. The second is the instruction list you just wrote now with an onoff toggle. The third is connected apps, and that one does the heavy lifting because it's what pulls a real answer out of your Gmail or your calendar instead of guessing at one.

01:56 Same three sections on both plans. What changes is how well they talk to each other. So, turn the connected apps on right now, all of them. Switch on Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Photos, and YouTube, or whatever you actually live in. On free, the answers come back correct but literal. So, [music] you have to point at the app you want inside the prompt. On a paid account, it connects those

02:19 dots by itself, pulling from your past chats, your instructions, and your apps in one answer without being asked. That gap is the strongest argument for paying anything at all. 5 minutes in here makes everything after it better. When the task actually matters to me, [music] I want to see what Claude does with the same prompt and what GPT does with it and then [music] decide. Gemini will

02:42 never show me that. No setting in here. Fix it. That's the reason I built AA Master. And yes, it's my own platform and a paid product of mine. So, treat [music] the next 2 minutes as an ad from the guy who owns the thing. I'd rather say that out loud than bury it. I'm plugging this prompt into the AI master chat. Next, I pick the model from this drop down right here. Chat, GPT, Grock,

03:06 Claude, and Gemini all sit in literally one subscription. Watch what I do. I run the answer on Gemini, then run it again on chat GPT [music] and put the two next to each other to see which one actually understood the question. That's the comparison you physically cannot do inside Gemini. [music] And it takes about 15 seconds here. And per token, it lands cheaper than paying each [music]

03:31 of those companies separately. The chat is only the front door. Image generation, voice over, and video generation all live in the same place on [music] the same subscription, and they're cheaper per token, too, which is normally three separate tools and three separate bills. Then there's the part that matters more than I expected it to. There's an academy in there, too. 200 plus lessons and roughly 30 hours of

03:55 material. And on the site, you'll find the results section with real case screenshots, plus demo videos of actual members saying what the platform did for them. Go look at those before you take my word for any of this. The path in is short, and I'll click through it on screen so you can see the whole thing. You land on the page. You pick the annual subscription with the discount on it. You fill in your details and the

04:18 confirmation email shows up while you're still sitting on the tab. Then you're inside the [music] account and working. On top of that, there is a 7-day money back guarantee. So, if it turns out not to be for you, you take your money back and [music] walk away. Back to Gemini. Navigation takes about a minute to learn. The Gemini logo in the top left always takes you home. The three lines on the left expand the [music] menu, and

04:41 clicking them again collapses it. Inside there, you get a new chat button, your save stuff, your gems, and your full chat history with a search box on top. Any chat can be pinned, renamed, deleted, or shared from the three dots next to it. That's the whole map. The one item worth explaining is temporary chat, [music] which is basically incognito. Nothing you type there lands

05:04 in your history. Nothing feeds personal intelligence, and nothing gets used for model training. That last part matters because Gemini doesn't give you a clean opt out of training the way some competitors do. There is a setting for it, [music] but flipping it also stops saving your chats, which guts the entire product. So, use temporary chat for the sensitive stuff and leave the rest on.

05:26 Below the text box, there's a microphone and I turn it on before anything else. Click it once, allow the permission for the site, and now you talk instead of type. I talk maybe three times faster than I type. And long prompts are where model quality actually comes from. That's it for the furniture. Everything past this point is where the real difference between an underwhelming Gemini and a great one lives. If you're

05:49 running a business and juggling 10 different tools right now, what if I told you that one platform could replace all of them? This is go high level. You get access to pretty much all the features. Social media planner. You can schedule posts, see your content calendar, and even repost content across multiple platforms with one click. Email marketing. Go Highle has a full email suite. You can create campaigns, build

06:13 email templates with a drag and drop editor. Go HighLevel has a built-in calendar and booking system. This replaces tools like Calendarly. You can create different calendar types, one-on-one meetings, group calls, roundroin scheduling if you have a team. And here's the best part. Go Highle has a ton of pre-built workflow templates. I've linked a 30-day free trial in the

06:36 description, not the standard 14 days, an exclusive extended trial. First thing worth breaking down what models actually exist here, how they're different from each other, and which one you personally need. The drop-down now gives you three models directly. [music] No more digging through settings to find them. Flashlight sits at the top, built for the fastest answers on questions that

06:59 barely need any reasoning. Flash is the all-around option, the one you'll probably leave selected most days. Pro is the heaviest of the three, [music] built for advanced reasoning, and most people will genuinely never need it as their default. Below those three sits a separate toggle called extended [music] thinking. It doesn't replace your model choice. It stacks on top of it. Turn it on with flash selected. You get a fast

07:23 model that now pauses to reason through the problem before it answers. Watch what this looks like in practice. I'll ask the same question on flash with extended thinking off. The answer starts appearing basically as I let go of the key. Now I turn extended thinking on for the same prompt. You can see it sit there for a few seconds first and what comes back is more structured and

07:45 catches a nuance the fast version missed entirely. Your limits depend on your plan and this is where the free tier bites. Free gets you basic to all three models plus extended thinking layered on top. Google stopped publishing a fixed daily number for any of it. The allowance is measured in compute and it refreshes every few hours. Burn through it and Gemini quietly drops you to a

08:07 lighter model until the reset. I hit that wall twice. So on free, stick with flashlight or flash for everyday questions and [music] save extended thinking for the prompts that actually matter. On a paid account, I leave extended thinking on permanently and that alone is worth more to me than any headline feature. The number in front of each name is the generation, and that's where the real capability jumps happen.

08:31 A 3.8 Flash is not the same engine as whatever ships after it, even though the name Flash sticks around. Google keeps improving the model behind each label, and the version number is your signal for how recent that engine actually is. The jump between generations is where you feel it. Bigger context windows, better multi-step reasoning, better handling of images and video in the same

08:55 prompt. Right as I'm filming this, Google rolled out a new model called Gemini 3.8 Flash. It's the small cheap model, but on one long horizon coding benchmark, it scores within a point of Claude's Opus 5. And it's noticeably faster. It's also cheaper to run per request than Opus 5. That's the real story with Gemini right now. Google

09:17 keeps closing the gap with a cheap model instead of waiting on the next flagship. Click upgrade in the sidebar and you get four tiers, free, plus, pro, and ultra. Ultra is for the top 1% of power users, and I'd ignore it unless you already know exactly why you want it. Start free because most people can live there for months. [music] The tier I'd actually pay for is pro. And the reason isn't a

09:40 feature list. It's personal intelligence, generous access to extended thinking, and video generation in the same subscription. Prices change often enough that any number I say today is wrong by the time you watch this. So, check the page yourself. What I can [music] tell you is where the value cliff sits. Free to pro is a genuine jump in what the product can do. Pro to

10:03 ultra is a jump in how much of it you can use. If you're a normal person using this for work, email, and learning, that first jump is the one that pays for itself. Through this video, I'll flag which account I'm on because some of what I'm about to show you simply isn't there on free. Click tools under the chat box, and the first one is deep research. On free, you get a handful of

10:26 runs a month on paid a lot more. It goes away for several minutes and comes back with a genuinely enormous report complete with charts and tables. Here's one I ran just now. Look at the language in it. It opens with the words geopolitical and operational security assessment, which tells you exactly who this was written for. It wasn't written for you. Deep research is impressive and

10:49 mostly overkill. If you're doing academic work, a market [music] study, or a competitive analysis you have to defend in a meeting, it's excellent and it will save you a day. For a normal question, it hands you 15 pages when you needed a paragraph [music] and you end up skimming your own report. I turn it off and leave it off. When I do need it, I know before I open the app. Create

11:12 images is in that same menu and you can ignore the button entirely. Just say create an image and describe what you want. Gemini figures out the intent on its own and the same is true of the create videos tool on pay plans. Most of these toggles are shortcuts for something you can trigger with plain language, which is a pattern worth internalizing. One quick note on Canvas.

11:35 Turn it on and Gemini stops writing inside the chat. It opens a document panel next to it instead, [music] so long emails, essays, or code stay editable in one place instead of buried in scroll history. Guided learning is the tool I'd hand to any student. You turn it on and describe what you're trying to learn. So, I'll say I'm studying for the bar exam and I need

11:58 help with New York contract law. Instead of dumping an essay on me, it talks like a tutor and asks which part I want to work on first. I pick breach, performance, and remedies, and it introduces the concept and then quizzes me on it before moving to the next piece. That back and forth is the difference between reading about something and actually retaining it. Down at the bottom of the chat box is

12:21 add files, and it's more flexible than it looks. images, [music] screenshots, PDFs, Word documents, all go in. You can pull anything straight [music] out of Google Drive or photos without downloading it first. And you can attach a Notebook LM notebook, which is the part most people never notice. Notebook LM is Google's research tool, and you get to it from the same menu. Each

12:43 notebook is a bucket for one topic holding whatever sources you dumped in there. I have dozens of them. two on this account, [music] but dozens on the one I actually work in. That connection is the workflow I'd steal if I were you. Keep your reference material organized in notebook LM by topic, then attach the relevant notebook whenever you start a serious chat in Gemini. I did it with a

13:08 training notebook and asked for a program to get me to a one-armed pull-up. It wrote the plan of my sources instead of off the general internet, which is the whole difference between a generic answer and a useful one. Gems live in the left menu, and they're the closest thing Gemini has to a superpower. There are two kinds, the ones you build yourself and the ones labs lets you generate. Start with your

13:31 own. Scroll to my gems and click new gem. The use case is stupidly simple. If you catch yourself pasting the same instructions into a fresh chat every Monday, that's a gem. Mine is called email helper and the description field is just for me. So I wrote helps me with emails and moved on. The name and description change nothing about the behavior. The instructions box is where

13:54 the whole thing lives because those instructions apply to every chat you ever open inside that gem. Writing help me with my emails does nothing for you. You want tone, length, what to never do, how to sign off, who you're usually writing to. If you're staring at a blank box, there's an expand button that takes your oneliner and inflates it into a full instruction set. Use it as a first

14:18 draft and then edit it line by line because it will confidently add rules you didn't ask for. Below that, you pick default tools and those fire automatically every time. For an email gem, I turned Canvas on. So, every draft opens in the editing panel instead of the chat. Then comes knowledge, which is the other real reason to build a gem. You upload files once and they're

14:41 permanently attached. Say your company has a PDF style guide for how emails go out. Load it [music] in and every email this gem writes already follows it. If you do customer support, load the product documentation and the help [music] guides and you've built yourself a support agent in about 4 minutes. From then on, it's one click. Open gems, click email helper, paste the [music]

15:03 email, and it runs with my instructions, my knowledge files, and canvas already on. Editing later happens through the three dots next to the gem. Above your own gems, there might be a section called gems made by labs. And this one genuinely surprised me. These aren't prompts. They're small apps you build inside Gemini. So, I clicked new gem and asked for a task management app built

15:27 specifically for YouTubers. Under a minute later, it was running. I clicked start and it worked. [music] And what makes these different from a normal little app is that Gemini is the engine underneath. So, the app can actually reason instead of just sorting rows in a table. If something bugs you while you're testing it, you don't go find the settings panel. You tell Gemini on the left to change it and it rebuilds the

15:49 app. This is another one I could spend a whole video on. I've switched to my pro account for this next part, mostly because I burned through my extended thinking limit on free again. Image editing does work on free, but it works noticeably better with extended thinking on, so it's worth the switch. I upload a photo of myself and ask it to turn this into a professional LinkedIn ready

16:12 profile photo. Notice I never touch the create image button. Gemini reads the intent, sees the attached photo, and understands it's an edit rather than a new generation. What comes back is genuinely usable. Video generation is paid only, and the limits are tight enough that you need a strategy. Here's mine. Don't ask for a video first because if you don't like it, you just

16:35 burned one of your few generations on a bad idea. Generate the still image first. Iterate on it for free until the frame is exactly right. Then copy that image into a new chat. Turn on create videos and tell it to use this as the start frame. I did a dog skydiving. The last web feature is scheduled

16:57 actions and it's paid only. This one turns Gemini from something you visit into something that runs without you. You don't dig through a settings page to set it up either. You just say it in a chat. I told it every day at 6:00 a.m. Mountain time. Look for the latest AI news from the past 24 hours. It confirmed the schedule immediately and now that task sits [music] in the

17:19 scheduled actions panel where I can edit it with the pencil icon or toggle it off when I get sick of it. Each run pings me in the mobile app. Most of the phone app mirrors the web, so there's not much to relearn. Three things are genuinely different, and the first is the camera. Point it at something, take the photo, and ask, "What is this?" It's the fastest way I know to identify an object

17:42 you don't have words for. It's also quietly excellent for travel because you can shoot a sign in a language you don't read and get the translation back in a couple of seconds. That's a use case I didn't expect to lean on as much as I do. The second thing is inside the tools menu on a paid plan, there's a template section for video which gives you preset styles instead of starting from a blank

18:04 prompt. It's fun and I'd [music] call it a toy rather than a workflow. Mainly because your daily video limit disappears in about four taps. Use it if you want to see what the model can do stylistically. Don't build anything around it. The third one is the reason I keep the app on my home screen. There is a button that opens a realtime voice conversation with Gemini, and it's the closest thing to talking with someone

18:28 who's read everything. I use it while driving, on walks, and constantly while cooking. No typing, no screen, no waiting for a page to load. Then it gets better because mid-con conversation you can turn the camera on and it keeps talking. I pointed it at a deck of cards on my desk and asked, "What is this and what do I use it for?" It identified them as a deck of playing cards without

18:50 breaking the flow of the conversation. When you end the session, everything you discussed is saved as a normal chat you can scroll back through. That condemnation of voice plus live camera is the single feature I'd miss most if Google pulled it tomorrow. Here's my honest scoring after living in both accounts. Personal intelligence and gems are the two things that made Gemini a daily tool for me instead of a tab I

19:14 open twice a week. And live voice chat with the camera is the one I'd pay for on its own. Deep research is a beautifully built feature I almost never need. You're using Gemini like a chatbot and you're missing the one feature that turns it into a real production tool. It's called Canvas and it is not the