Google brings Gemini to Google Pay: What is Ask Google Pay and how does it work?

Google is now bringing the power of Gemini to Google Pay, giving users the ability to better understand their finances by analysing spending patterns, explaining financial concepts and offering personalised money management insights.

The new feature is an opt-in experience, meaning users will have to explicitly agree to use it before it is activated. Meanwhile, the company has also introduced the new Google Pay Flex SBI Card in India, built on the RuPay network.

What is Ask Google Pay?

Ask Google Pay is an AI-powered feature inside the popular payments app that analyses users' spending patterns and gives them information to help manage their money better. Built using the power of Gemini, the feature allows users to understand their spending patterns, get tips on how to save better, explore offers on the right credit card for them and even learn about their SIPs or CIBIL score from the chat window.

"While UPI has simplified and sped up digital payments, users often have questions about their money, from seeking guidance during a payment to understanding where their money was spent last month," Google wrote in a blog post.

The feature is available in both text and voice, with support for 10 Indian languages at launch. Users can also ask follow-up questions to Google's AI, such as "Analyse my spends from last week" or "What is the best card for my spends?"

Google says its new feature is currently rolling out to a limited number of Google Pay users in India. In order to use it, users will need to enable the "Personalisation within Google Pay" setting, which is turned off by default.

After the setting is enabled, Ask Google Pay can access a user's Google Pay transactions, saved payment methods, Google Account information and CIBIL report data to generate more tailored responses.

Google also gives users the option to view their chat history with Ask Google Pay for up to 42 days and turn off personalisation if they wish to.

Is Ask Google Pay safe?

Google promises on a support page that users' financial data remains within the Google Pay ecosystem and is not used to train its AI models. The company also highlighted that highly sensitive information, including full bank account numbers, complete card details and government-issued financial IDs, is never stored, accessed or processed by Ask Google Pay.

However, the company does admit that users' conversations with Ask Google Pay will be used for "product improvements within Google Pay". Where this occurs, Google says it implements rigorous privacy-preserving controls and anonymisation techniques to protect users' identities.

How to start using Ask Google Pay?

In order to begin using Ask Google Pay, users will first need to enable the "Personalisation within Google Pay" setting.

To enable the setting:

Open the Google Pay app.

Head to Settings > Privacy & Security > Data and personalisation and turn on Personalisation.

Open the Money tab on the home screen and tap "Ask a question" under the "Ask About your finances" section to begin chatting with the AI assistant.