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Gemini Spark review: promising, not quite ready

A genuine glimpse of the agent future, sold at a premium and shipped a little early.

Lulu KirituUpdated Jun 25, 20263 min readHow we work
A phone showing a personal assistant managing tasks.
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3.5/5

Simple verdict

A useful early personal agent that still needs too much supervision to become invisible help.

  • A real personal agent for non-developers
  • Works in the background
  • Useful for routine, repetitive chores
  • A clear look at where assistants are heading
  • Needs supervision
  • Occasional wrong actions
  • Premium pricing
  • Early and inconsistent

Gemini Spark is one of the first personal AI agents built for ordinary people rather than developers, and it is genuinely useful for routine digital chores. But it asks for trust it has not fully earned yet, it costs premium money, and it still needs supervision. Promising, worth watching, not yet worth relying on.

Google introduced Spark as a personal agent inside the Gemini app: a tool that does not just answer you but goes off and does things, building custom workflows and continuing to work in even when your phone is locked. After spending time with it, the short story is that the idea is right and the execution is early.

What it does well

The core promise lands more often than I expected. For routine, low-stakes tasks, organising and triaging, drafting and queuing things up, pulling together information from across your day, Spark can genuinely take work off your plate and keep going in the background. When it works, it feels less like using an app and more like having handed something to a capable assistant. That is a real shift, and at consumer scale it is new.

Where it stumbles

The trouble is the same trouble every agent has: it acts, and acting means it can act wrongly. A few times it confidently did the not-quite-right thing, which meant I could never fully stop watching, and an agent you have to supervise constantly is only half an agent. It is also early in obvious ways, with rough edges and behaviour that varies. And it sits behind Google's premium subscription, so you are paying top prices to use something that still asks for your patience.

Who it is for

Spark is for the curious and the comfortable: people who enjoy being early, already pay for Google's top AI tier, and have low-stakes tasks they are happy to delegate and double-check. If you want something dependable that you can set and forget, wait. This is a first chapter, and a promising one, but it is not the finished book.

Go deeper

Spark runs as a cloud-based agent in the Gemini app and is offered to Google's top-tier AI subscribers. Because it acts on your behalf, it needs access to the apps and data it works with, so treat its permissions as a real decision and start it on low-stakes tasks. As with any agent, keep a human check on anything that sends messages, spends money, or cannot be undone.

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