People API

Name: People API API
Brand: Google People API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecCRMContact Managementoauth223 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Read and write a user's Google contacts and profile data, manage contact groups, and look up people by resourceName with field masks.

Quickstart

Get started with People API in minutes using your preferred integration method.

# Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf)
{
  "jentic": {
    "url": "https://api.jentic.com/mcp",
    "auth": "oauth"
  }
}

# Then ask your agent:
"list a user's Google contacts"

# → Jentic returns the GET /events tool with parameter schema, agent executes.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with People API API.

Retrieve authenticated user profile data and connected contacts with field-mask scoping

Create, update, and delete personal contacts in a user's Google Contacts list

Organise contacts into contact groups and assign or remove members in batch

Search auto-saved otherContacts surfaced from Gmail and Chat interactions

GET STARTED

Start building with People API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use Cases

Patterns agents use People API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ CRM Contact Sync

Synchronise a user's Google Contacts into a third-party CRM so sales reps see the same address book on every device. The People API exposes 23 endpoints covering personal contacts, contact groups, and otherContacts, with sync tokens that return only changes since the last poll. A typical initial backfill of a 5,000-contact list completes in minutes, then incremental syncs run in seconds.

List all connections for the authenticated user with personFields=names,emailAddresses,phoneNumbers and pageSize=200, then upsert each Person into the target CRM keyed by resourceName.

User Profile Onboarding

Pull a signed-in user's profile fields during sign-up so an application does not need to re-collect names, photos, and email addresses already verified by Google. Calling people/me with the right field mask returns names, emailAddresses, and photos in a single request, cutting onboarding form steps and improving conversion. The OAuth scope used here is contacts.readonly or userinfo.profile depending on which fields are requested.

Call GET /v1/people/me with personFields=names,emailAddresses,photos using the user's OAuth access token and map the returned Person object to the app's user record.

Contact Group Management

Build features that group contacts into segments such as Customers, Vendors, or Investors and apply bulk operations to each group. The People API exposes contactGroups CRUD endpoints plus a members:modify endpoint for batch membership changes. Groups can hold up to several thousand members and a single modify call can add or remove up to 1,000 contacts per request.

POST /v1/contactGroups to create a group named 'Customers', then call /v1/contactGroups/{resourceName}/members:modify with resourceNamesToAdd containing the IDs of 25 customer contacts.

Other Contacts Discovery

Surface contacts that Google has inferred from a user's Gmail and Chat history but never explicitly saved. The otherContacts.list and otherContacts.search endpoints return these auto-detected people with email and name fields, making it easy to suggest 'add to contacts' or autocomplete sender lists. This data is read-only and limited to the contacts.other.readonly scope.

Call GET /v1/otherContacts:search?query=acme&readMask=emailAddresses,names to find every inferred contact whose name or email contains 'acme'.

AI Agent Contact Lookup via Jentic

Agents that need to resolve a person mentioned in a prompt can use Jentic to call the People API without managing OAuth tokens or field masks directly. Jentic stores the user's Google credentials in its vault, exposes a single search query to find the right operation, and returns a typed schema the agent fills in. This turns a multi-day OAuth integration into a sub-hour wiring task.

Search Jentic for 'find a Google contact by name', load the people.connections.list schema, and execute it with personFields=names,emailAddresses and a query filter.

Key Endpoints

23 endpoints — the google people api provides programmatic access to a user's profile and contacts stored in their google account.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/v1/people/{resourceName}

Get a single Person with field mask

GET

/v1/people:batchGet

Fetch multiple people in one call

POST

/v1/people:batchCreateContacts

Create up to 200 contacts at once

POST

/v1/people:batchDeleteContacts

Delete up to 500 contacts at once

GET

/v1/contactGroups

List the user's contact groups

POST

/v1/contactGroups/{resourceName}/members:modify

Add or remove contact group members in bulk

GET

/v1/otherContacts:search

Search inferred contacts from Gmail and Chat

GET

/v1/people/{resourceName}

Get a single Person with field mask

GET

/v1/people:batchGet

Fetch multiple people in one call

POST

/v1/people:batchCreateContacts

Create up to 200 contacts at once

POST

/v1/people:batchDeleteContacts

Delete up to 500 contacts at once

GET

/v1/contactGroups

List the user's contact groups

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Google OAuth refresh tokens are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive scoped, short-lived access tokens at call time so refresh tokens and client secrets never enter the agent's context.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic with intents like 'list Google contacts' or 'create a Google contact group' and receive the matching People API operation with its full input schema, eliminating manual docs browsing.

Time to first call

Direct integration: 2-4 days for OAuth consent setup, token refresh, and field-mask handling. Through Jentic: under 1 hour.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Complementary

Gmail API

Send and read mail for the same user whose contacts you read via People

Choose Gmail when the task is sending or searching email; pair with People to resolve recipients to contacts.

Alternative

Google Workspace Admin SDK

Manage user, group, and directory data at the Workspace domain level

Choose Admin SDK when the task is administering an entire Workspace tenant rather than a single user's personal contacts.

Alternative

HubSpot CRM Contacts API

Manage contacts inside a HubSpot CRM rather than a personal Google account

Choose HubSpot when the contacts live in a sales CRM; choose People when they live in a user's Google Contacts.

FAQs

Specific to using People API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the Google People API use?

The People API uses OAuth 2.0 with user-consented scopes such as https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts, contacts.readonly, contacts.other.readonly, and userinfo.profile. Through Jentic the user's refresh token is stored encrypted in the Jentic vault and short-lived access tokens are injected at call time, so the agent never sees the raw credential.

Can I create contacts in bulk with the People API?

Yes. POST /v1/people:batchCreateContacts accepts up to 200 contacts per call and returns the created Person resources, and POST /v1/people:batchDeleteContacts accepts up to 500 resourceNames per call. For very large imports loop over batches with a backoff to respect per-user quotas.

What are the rate limits for the Google People API?

The People API enforces standard Google quotas measured in queries per minute per user and per project. Default project quotas can be raised in Google Cloud Console. When using Jentic, transient 429 responses are surfaced to the agent so it can back off rather than retrying blindly.

How do I list all of a user's contacts through Jentic?

Run jentic search 'list a user's Google contacts', load the returned operation schema for GET /v1/people/me/connections, and execute it with personFields set to the fields you need (for example names,emailAddresses,phoneNumbers) and pageSize=200. Jentic handles the OAuth token exchange and pagination cursor automatically.

Is the People API free?

The Google People API is free to use within standard Google API quotas. There is no per-request charge, but each Google Cloud project has rate limits and a daily quota that can be increased on request.

Can I retrieve contacts inferred from Gmail without saving them?

Yes. The otherContacts resource exposes contacts auto-detected from email and chat interactions. Use GET /v1/otherContacts to list them or GET /v1/otherContacts:search to filter by name or email. This data requires the contacts.other.readonly scope and is read-only.