Google is well known for having millions of identical items with wildly divergent names that don’t seem to have anything in common. (May I draw your attention to a texting app?) However, coming ahead, just one moniker will count in terms of its AI work: Gemini.
The business revealed on Thursday that it is rebranding its chatbot Bard as Gemini, launching an Android app specifically called Gemini, and integrating all of Duet AI’s capabilities into Google Workspace under the Gemini name. Additionally, it declared that the public would soon be able to access Gemini Ultra 1.0, the biggest and most powerful iteration of Google’s huge language model.
The majority of users will probably find the new function through Gemini’s mobile apps. Gemini may be set as your default assistant on Android devices by downloading the new app. This means that Gemini will take the place of Google Assistant as the app that launches when you say “Hey Google” or press and hold the home button. Although it doesn’t appear that Google is completely abandoning Assistant just yet, the firm has been deprioritizing Assistant for some time and makes it plain that Gemini is the way of the future. “I think it’s a super important first step towards building a true AI assistant,” remarks Sissie Hsiao, the Google employee in charge of Bard (now Gemini). “One that is more helpful than ever, multimodal, and conversational.”
You won’t be able to pick a non-Siri assistant as the default and there isn’t a Gemini app specifically for iOS, but you can use all the AI features in the Google app. To further illustrate how significant Gemini is to Google, there will be a toggle at the top of the app that allows you to switch between Search and Gemini. Search has been Google’s most significant product for the entire company, but there are signs that Gemini may be just as essential.
The majority of the other Gemini modifications are related to branding. The chatbot will continue to function as it did before, even though Google is removing the Bard moniker. Similarly, all of the AI capabilities found in Google Workspace apps, such as Gmail and Docs—which were formerly known as “Duet AI” but are now also referred to as Gemini—will continue to function as they did before. These are the functions that assist you with drafting emails, managing spreadsheets, and completing other duties connected to your job.
The majority of users will continue to utilize the Gemini Pro standard edition of the product. The most potent version of the model, Gemini Ultra, requires the use of a Gemini Advanced subscription, which is included in the new $20 monthly Google One AI Premium plan. (Google, these names are not helpful!) For those customers, Google pitches it as merely an additional $10 per month as the membership includes 2TB of Google Drive storage in addition to all the other advantages of Google One. For all other users, the cost is the same as that of ChatGPT Plus and other goods; $20 per month appears to be the average cost of a sophisticated AI bot.
Gemini Ultra “sets the state of the art across a wide range of benchmarks across text, image, audio, and video” for only $20 a month, according to Hsiao. The Ultra model is intended to be more adept at complicated tasks like coding and is capable of carrying out lengthier conversations with greater context.
