This past Tuesday, Google announced a new artificial intelligence product in Gemini Live. Similar to the recently announced GPT-4o from OpenAI, Gemini Live is a native multi-modal AI model with impressive voice and video capabilities.
Gemini Live is just one portion of “Project Astra”, a universal AI agent that is potentially coming to smart glasses. For now, Gemini Live will be the first iteration of it in the wild on smartphones.
We were able to see tests of speech and video conversations during demos at Google I/O 2024.
However, Gemini Live isn’t available today. So what features will be available and when can we expect to see Gemini Live on Android devices? Read on to find out.
Gemini Live features
Google just made the Gemini 1.5 available to paid Gemini Advanced users. It brings with it the expanded context window, which allows Gemini to parse multiple large documents or summarize up to 100 emails for example.
1.5 adds improvements to image understanding and building visualizations and charts. Unlike GPT-4o, Gemini does rely on other models like Imagen 3 and Google Veo for outputting images and video.
The 1.5 update is bringing the ability to upload Google Docs, PDFs and other documents into Gemini for summaries, feedback and answers.
Gemini Live will be part of that update, if you’re a Gemini Advanced paid user. You can try it out for two months free, but after that Gemini Advanced costs $19.99 a month.
Gemini Live will be accessible in the Gemini app on both Android and iOS via the voice icon in the app. It becomes full screen and enables users to have a 2-way conversation with Gemini.
Similar to GPT-4o, users can speak at their pace and interrupt Gemini to add new information or clarify prompts. Most demos and videos showcased at Google I/O 2024 featured one female voice and one male voice. 10 different voices are supposed to be available to choose from.
Gemini Live will be getting a Google Lens-esque feature that allows users to use the camera on their phone. This will enable Gemini Live to “see” the world through the camera and provide feedback and answers, a precursor to the potential Project Astra smart glasses that Google snuck into its live demo video.
When will Gemini Live be available?
Even for Gemini Advanced users, Gemini Live won’t immediately be available. A blog post from Google says the “coming months.” We found a tweet from Google during I/O claiming “this summer”.
We don’t expect that anyone will have Gemini Live in June. It seems we won’t see Gemini Live until late July at the earliest.
On top of that, the ability to use the camera isn’t coming until “later this year," which most likely means a late fall update.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen updates on when everyone will be able to access Gemini Live. The best we've seen is "the near future" which could be any time in 2024 to next year.
