Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere right now. Applications like ChatGPT are in the news almost daily for their advancements, while others like Claude are being used to do everything from drafting cover letters to writing (admittedly bad) novels. Google Gemini is Google’s latest foray into that AI arena, replacing Google Assistant in many ways — and it’s integrated into numerous mobile devices, like the Google Pixel line of phones.
Understanding what Gemini is and what it can do might seem daunting, but it’s easier than you think. It can also greatly simplify specific day-to-day tasks and help you find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had, all without reading through pages and pages of articles. Here’s everything you need to know to not only start using Gemini, but making it work for you.
What is Google Gemini?
Have you ever used Google Assistant before? If yes, then you have at least a high-level grasp of what eventually led to Google Gemini. Assistant was part of Google’s smart home system, and then it became an integral part of phones, too — but it always lacked certain functionality and never felt like “true” AI.
Gemini is the evolution of Google Assistant. It’s what’s called a multimodal AI model, which means it can process data from multiple sources and “understand” all of that information in context. It can recognize images, listen to recordings, and read written information and provide a breakdown of all of that in an easy-to-understand way.
The first whispers of Gemini emerged at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer’s conference, in 2023. It originally went by the codename Titan (in reference to Saturn’s moon), but eventually changed to Gemini. Gemini is both a constellation and the Latin word for “twins,” which proved to be particularly apropos as the AI grew from the work of two separate teams at Google: DeepMind and Google Brain.
The AI launched in December 2023 and has only grown and developed more since then. Other Google projects, like Bard and Duet AI, have now fallen under the overall Gemini umbrella. The language model has now become integrated into many phones, laptops, and much more, and is capable of working with certain apps in a way few others can match.
The most recent version, Gemini 2.5 Pro, is now available to all Gemini users and is capable of “thinking” about the questions you ask and providing more comprehensive, targeted answers.
How is Gemini different from Google Assistant?
Google Gemini is a fully-featured artificial intelligence with a much wider range of capabilities, while Google Assistant is a set of routines with limited processing power. Google Assistant can perform a set number of functions, but isn’t able to search for answers or process queries the same way Gemini can.
The main differences boil down to this: Gemini is an artificial intelligence, while Google Assistant is not.
What can Gemini do?
It might be easier to ask what Gemini can’t do. That one is easy: it can’t perform tasks that require physicality, at least not yet. That might not be too far in the future, though, since Gemini Robotics (another division of Google) is working on consumer-grade robotic assistants that can do things like fold your clothes, cleaning your home, and even playing basketball.
Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say Gemini can’t do those things. It’s more than capable of understanding how — it just needs an interface that would allow it to do so. We often joke about AI resembling Rosie from The Jetson’s, but the truth is that we are a lot closer to that than many people realize.
As for the rest of Gemini’s capabilities, it depends on exactly what you want.
Video creation
If you subscribe to Google One AI Premium (a paid access tier that provides more advanced functionality), you can use Google’s Veo 2 tool to create videos based on just a few lines of text input.
Currently, Veo 2 can create eight-second clips at 720p resolution. According to Google, Veo 2 “understands the unique language of cinematography.” You can request specific focal lengths, effects, and more, with resolutions up to 4K and minutes in length. More than that, Veo 2 has fewer hallucinations than its competitors. That means you’ll have fewer characters appearing with too many fingers.
Information processing
Google Gemini can examine up to 30,000 lines of code or around 1,500 pages of text simultaneously. Feed it a novel and it can summarize the plot, pull out themes, discussion questions, and more. It can help identify flaws in code and assist programmers with troubleshooting.
If you feed Gemini a podcast or an audio recording, it can listen for you and answer specific questions and provide timestamps. Gemini is even able to integrate with other Google apps like Gmail and create travel itineraries based on information in your inbox.
I could provide dozens of other examples. When it comes to Gemini, you can utilize it in a wider variety of ways than we can list here.
Image creation
Gemini can also generate images from a textual description. It uses Imagen 3, which Google describes as its “highest quality text-to-image model yet.” Tell it what you want it to include in the image, the style you want it to use, and any other relevant details. It can generate anything from old-school cartoons to photorealistic landscapes.
Once it spits out the image, you can refine it to more closely resemble your vision for how it should look.
Research
One of Gemini’s most powerful skills is its Deep Research ability. It can look through hundreds of different sources in real-time in just minutes to find the answers you’re looking for. For example, you could ask Gemini to find the best locations across the globe for finding beach glass. It could then look into everything from travel blogs to user reviews on Google Maps to find locations and suggest them to you. After that, you could ask it to find the best time to purchase flights to any of those locations.
Deep Research can save you hours of manual searches, and since it provides sources for where it pulls the information from, you can double-check to verify accuracy. Google has put a lot of work into ensuring Gemini returns accurate responses, but it’s always best to corroborate information yourself instead of taking it at face value.
Gemini Live
You can even have a conversation with Gemini through Gemini Live. This lets you speak directly to Gemini without typing in your question, and it will respond in a way that feels natural. You can even interrupt Gemini halfway through a sentence to ask a follow-up question. It’s almost like chatting with a real person.
Gemini Live is great for on-the-go use, especially if you’re using Bluetooth headphones and are trying to get information while on the move. Gemini can process real-time video, giving you answers about what you’re looking at while you walk down the street.
Which devices can use Gemini?
Google Gemini is currently available as an app for Android and iOS devices. You can download it and try out its features for yourself, and there’s even a one-month free trial available of the Google One subscription plan. Later this year, Google plans to replace Google Assistant with Gemini on the majority of devices including smart home speakers, TVs, and more.
However, not all devices will see the change. A device must run Android 10 or higher and. have more than 2GB of RAM to support Gemini. While the vast majority of modern devices will run the app without difficulty, some older Android gadgets might not work.
Gemini even works with Samsung devices and will tap into native Samsung apps for information it might need.
How to change Gemini’s settings
In its current state, there aren’t too many settings Gemini will allow you to change. Here’s how you can tweak it.
From gemini.google.com, click the three bars in the top-left corner of the screen and select Settings. From here, you can select Saved info, Apps, Your public links, or toggle a slider for Dark Mode.
Saved Info allows you to provide Gemini with information specific to yourself, such as dietary preferences, preferred style of responses, and more.
Apps is self-explanatory. It’s a series of sliders that let you link Gemini to Google Workspace, YouTube, and other applications.
Your public links are chats you’ve opted to share with others. You can see who you’ve shared the chat with and delete it or revoke access from this page.
Which is better: Siri or Gemini?
Gemini is better. Hands-down.
From a purely technical standpoint, Gemini far outperforms anything Siri can dream of doing. While there is hope for Siri to improve when Apple rolls out the new and improved version of its voice assistant with Apple Intelligence, the company is already far behind schedule on that front.
Siri would need to play a lot of catch-up to get anywhere close to what Gemini is currently capable of, and Gemini’s head start makes the possibility of Siri closing the gap a slim one. If you’re an iPhone user and debating whether to wait for Siri to get better or choose Gemini, just go ahead and download the iOS Gemini app. You’ll get far more use out of it in the meantime, and you can always make the jump back to Siri if the new version ever drops.
