Articles

Image: The Verge Google is adding a bunch of new features to its Gemini AI, and one of the most powerful is a personalization option called “Gems” that allows users to create custom versions of the Gemini assistant with varying personalties. Gems lets you create iterations of chatbots that can help you with certain tasks and retain specific characteristics, kind of like making your own bot in Character.AI, the service that lets you talk to virtualized versions of popular characters and...

The dream of contextual search is alive. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is updating Gemini on Android to let its AI better tap into what’s on your screen. The update should allow Gemini to lean into one of its best use cases, helping you make sense of a limited set of data as you go about your day. If you set Gemini as the default assist on your Android phone, it can already summarize or answer questions about a webpage or a screenshot. Soon, it’ll also be able to...

Google might tell you f = ma, or something. I haven’t been to school for a long time. | Image: Google Google is enhancing Android’s Circle to Search — the feature that lets you literally circle something on your Android phone’s screen to search it on Google — with a new ability to generate instructions on how to solve school math and physics problems. Using an Android phone or tablet, students can now use Circle to Search to get AI assistance on mathematical word problems from their...

Image: The Verge Google is building its Gemini AI into Chrome on desktop. During its I/O event on Tuesday, Google announced that Chrome 126 will use Gemini Nano to power on-device AI features, such as text generation. Gemini Nano is the lightweight large language model Google introduced to the Pixel 8 Pro last year — and, later, the Pixel 8. To get Gemini Nano on Chrome, Google says it tweaked the model and optimized the browser to “load the model quickly.” The integration will let you do...

Illustration: The Verge Gemini, Google’s ChatGPT competitor, is getting new trip planning capabilities, the company announced today at its I/O developer conference. Based on the user’s prompt, the AI model will now research publicly available information as well as tap into specific details like flight times and hotel bookings to work up a custom, multiday vacation itinerary “in a matter of seconds.” In a briefing with reporters, Google VP and general manager of Gemini, Sissie Hsiao, said...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is working on new protections to help prevent Android users from falling victim to phone scams. During its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced that it’s testing a new call monitoring feature that will warn users if the person they’re talking to is likely attempting to scam them and encourage them to end such calls. Google says the feature utilizes Gemini Nano — a reduced version of the company’s Gemini large language model...

Veo demos show that Google’s AI-generated video capabilities have come a long way. | Image: Google It’s been three months since OpenAI demoed its captivating text-to-video AI, Sora, and now Google is trying to steal some of that spotlight. Announced during its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google says Veo — its latest generative AI video model — can generate “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos over a minute in length in a wide variety of visual and cinematic styles. Veo has “an...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Part of Google’s vision at its I/O developer conference this year has involved transforming its Gemini AI chatbot into more of a digital assistant that specializes in dealing with our day-to-day tedium. One of the new ways it’s doing that is by integrating Gemini with Google Calendar, Tasks, and Keep. The new integrations, which Google says are coming “soon” come by way of the extensions the company added to Bard last year and have continued with its...

Astra is meant to be a real-time, multimodal AI assistant. | Image: Google “I’ve had this vision in my mind for quite a while,” says Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind and the leader of Google’s AI efforts. Hassabis has been thinking about and working on AI for decades, but four or five years ago, something really crystallized. One day soon, he realized, “we would have this universal assistant. It’s multimodal, it’s with you all the time.” Call it the Star Trek Communicator; call...

Image: Google Google Photos already has impressive search capabilities, but Google is using Gemini to dial those powers up to the next level. During today’s I/O keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai announced “Ask Photos,” a new feature coming this summer that should make the service much smarter when it comes to understanding what it is you’re looking for, using artificial intelligence to connect the dots for more sophisticated requests. Pichai asked the app, “What’s my license plate number again?”...