Google is famous for having a million similar products with confusingly different names and seemingly nothing in common. (Can I interest you in a messaging app?) But when it comes to its ai work, going forward there's only one name that matters: Gemini.
The company announced Thursday that it is changing the name. It's the bard chatbot to Gemini, launching a dedicated Gemini app for Android and even bringing all of its Duet ai features in Google Workspace to the Gemini brand. It also announced that Gemini Ultra 1.0, the largest and most capable version of Google's large language model, will be released to the public.
Gemini's mobile apps will likely be where most people find the new tool. If you download the new app on Android, you can set Gemini as your default assistant, meaning it replaces Google Assistant as what responds when you say “Hey Google” or hold down the home button. So far, it doesn't look like Google is getting rid of Assistant entirely, but the company has been deprioritizing Assistant for a while now and clearly believes Gemini is the future. “I think it's a very important first step toward creating a true ai assistant,” says Sissie Hsiao, who runs Bard (now Gemini) at Google. “One that is conversational, multimodal and more useful than ever.”
There's no dedicated Gemini app for iOS, and you can't set a non-Siri assistant as the default anyway, but you'll be able to access all the ai features in the Google app. And just to give you an idea of how important Gemini is to Google: there will be a switch at the top of the app that will allow you to switch from Search to Gemini. For Google's entire existence, Search has been its most important product by far; is beginning to indicate that Gemini could be equally important. (For now, by the way, Google's search ai is still called Generative Search Experience, but it's probably a safe bet that it will eventually be Gemini, too.)
The other changes to the Gemini are mostly brand-only. Google is ditching the Bard name, but otherwise its chatbot will feel like before; The same goes for all the ai features within Google's Workspace apps, such as Gmail and Docs, which were previously called “Duet ai” but are now also known as Gemini. Those are the features that help you compose an email, organize a spreadsheet, and perform other work-related tasks.
Most users will continue to use the standard version of the Gemini model, known as Gemini Pro. To use Gemini Ultra, the most powerful version of the model, you will need to sign up for a Gemini Advanced subscription, which is part of the new Google One ai Premium plan from $20 a month. (These names are not useful, Google!) The subscription also comes with 2 TB of Google Drive storage and all the other features of Google One subscription, so Google proposes it as a monthly increase of only $10 for those users. For everyone else, it's the same price as ChatGPT Plus and other products: $20 a month seems to be the going rate for a high-end ai bot.
The Ultra model can contain more context and have longer conversations.
For that $20 a month, Hsiao says Gemini Ultra “establishes the state of the art across a wide range of benchmarks in text, image, audio and video.” The Ultra model can hold more context and have longer conversations, and is designed to be better at complex things like coding and logical reasoning.
It's no surprise that Google is so committed to Gemini, but it raises the stakes for the company's ability to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the growing set of other powerful ai competitors in the market. In our testing just after the Gemini launched last year, the Gemini-powered Bard was very good, almost on par with the GPT-4, but it was significantly slower. Now Google needs to prove it can keep up with the industry as it looks to create a compelling consumer product and try to convince developers to rely on Gemini and not OpenAI.
Rarely in Google's history has it seemed like the entire company was betting on a single thing. Once, that became Google Plus… and we know how it went. But this time it seems that Google is fully committed to being an artificial intelligence company. And that means Gemini could be as big as Google.
