How to Get a Better Answer From Gemini

To maximize the usefulness of artificial intelligence chatbots, it’s all about using the right kinds of prompts. While AI chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT have an edit button (usually a pencil icon), it modifies the original prompt. With a recent update, Gemini now lets you use prompts to alter a selected part of the answer spewed by Google’s next-generation AI tool.

How to modify selected text in Gemini

What you are doing here is not modifying the prompt, but Gemini’s response. So, you can keep modifying selected parts of the answers to make them shorter or longer or regenerate them entirely. So far, it only works for English chats on the desktop using the Gemini web app. Let’s look at how this works with the following steps:

1. Open Gemini in a web browser and enter your prompt to generate an answer.

2. Within the response, highlight or select any snippet of the answer you want to change.

   

3. Click the pencil icon (with a star) next to the selection. An overflow menu gives you four choices to modify the selection and thus change the answer. They are self-explanatory:

   • Regenerate
   • Shorter
   • Longer
   • Remove

4. More crucially, you can enter another prompt in the text field that can change the context for the selected part and regenerate it with a different answer. The text field allows you to modify the answer in your own words. For instance, Gemini outputs a generic email responding to your original prompt. You can select a part of the text and use another prompt to make it more specific.

   

These steps work with a word, a sentence, or the entire response. Gemini already had a feature that allowed you to modify the whole answer, but this in-line method gives you more control by letting you change a part of the answer, expand or shorten it, or remove it entirely. The added prompt text field can help you add more context to a section and help Gemini generate more valuable answers.

For example, I tried it out with a prompt for designing a customized workout plan.

Can you design a workout plan for me for five days of the week that has 15 minutes of cardio and 30 minutes of weights? Include exercises for all parts of the body.

Then, I changed the cardio time to 20 minutes by tweaking the answer.

Credit: Screenshot by Saikat Basu

You can regenerate any part of the response and Gemini will bring up different versions of exercises and workouts. If you don’t like the new answer, just click on Undo.

Google also displays a “Draft modified by user” message before the response. Note that if your selection displays the Modify selected text icon next to it, you can alter it. Google says that some responses and parts of responses can’t be modified. You may get an error when Gemini fails to understand the prompt. Google covers other errors, too, in its support article.

Get the most out of Drafts and the Modify response feature

You can, of course, use this feature in combination with the still helpful Modify response filters and the Drafts.

The Modify response filter button is located just below the response and lets you make the entire answer Shorter, Longer, Simpler, More casual, or More professional. For instance, consider the medium. A choice of “Shorter” might be better for a social media post, while “More professional” is apt for an inter-office memo.

Credit: Screenshot by Saikat Basu

The Show drafts feature gives you three alternate versions of the response with different phrasings and tone. You can compare the three and see which response is closest to your need. For instance, the variations in tone are convenient when you are writing an important email and want to sound just right. You can then further tune the answers in any of the drafts or versions by selecting a portion of text that you want to change.