The number of active users on the Google Gemini app in Southeast Asia has more than doubled in a year, driven by Gen Z and local language capability.
Thailand leads the region in lifestyle companion usage, while 87% of prompts are written in Thai.
According to Gemini Report: Southeast Asia 2026, the region has adopted Gemini faster than any other Google app. Gemini is the most searched for artificial intelligence (AI) assistant in Thailand.
"Southeast Asia is not just keeping up with AI, but is setting the pace, with consumer interest in the region three times higher than the global average," said Sapna Chadha of Google Southeast Asia and South Asia Frontier.
Gemini serves more than 900 million users globally across 70 languages.
In Southeast Asia, the number of active Gemini app users has more than doubled in the last 12 months, making it the fastest-growing Google app for the region.
User engagement is deepening, as people are returning 50% more frequently and doubling their average prompts, said Ms Chadha.
Almost three out of four requests in the region come from mobile devices, a trend spearheaded by young "native AI users" who push the technology's limits through extended, complex problem-solving conversations rather than simply quick queries.
Samuele Saini, director for Google Ads Solutions & Insights in Southeast Asia, said users engage with Gemini across three dimensions: the user's purpose (the "why"), the output content (the "what") and the specific Gemini capability used (the "how").
Around 40% of regional prompts use Gemini as a generative collaborator to create new text, music, images and videos, while 20% use it as a research assistant to gather and summarise information, enhanced by real-time Google Search and Workspace integration.
Another 10% use it as a thought partner for two-way brainstorming and troubleshooting.
Users have created more than 5 billion images across the region since August 2025 and generated more than 1 million songs within a month of the launch of a music generation model.
Furthermore, more than 40% of interactions are multimodal (using voice, photos or videos), with more than 10% of conversations taking place via voice alone.
Regional adoption
Gemini adoption across Southeast Asia highlights diverse, country-specific use cases.
Indonesia leads the region in volume with 9 million daily custom ideas, driven heavily by mobile and voice inputs, while Singapore boasts the highest per capita adoption globally, shifting from weekday technical debugging to weekend lifestyle planning.
Meanwhile, the Philippines stands out as the only market with a majority-female user base, with users frequently leveraging AI for academic, creative and business process outsourcing-related tasks.
Malaysia leads in visual creativity, with the highest share of image generation, alongside a doubling of Malay-language interactions over the past year.
Saranee Boonritthongchai, director for Southeast Asia & South Asia Frontier Consumer Marketing, said seven out of 10 prompts in the region are made in local languages, led primarily by Vietnamese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia.
Thai users heavily favour their native language, with 87% of Gemini prompts written in Thai, the second-highest share among local languages.
While English is preferred for professional tasks and coding, Thai remains the go-to language for academic and casual topics.
Thailand is the market most likely to use Gemini for lifestyle queries, with one in three prompts related to this category.
Adoption is highly inclusive, popular among both "tech youth" and a "silver gen boom" of digitally active seniors who use voice commands and photo analysis for shopping.
Creative journeys are also highly popular, accounting for one in four prompts, driven significantly by female users who use the AI for creative tasks 50% more than men.
Young users under 25 are the most active users of Gemini in Thailand, making more requests per user than any other age group and having the longest conversations with Gemini.
Meanwhile, older Thais aged 55 and above (who make up 10% of the local user base) enthusiastically embrace multimodal inputs by communicating through voice and image prompts most of the time, which marks the highest senior multimodal adoption rate in the entire region.
According to the Southeast Asia Holistic Evaluation of Language Models by leading think tank AI Singapore, Gemini is the best-performing large language model for Southeast Asian languages.
Future of Gemini
Ms Chadha said Google is focusing on democratising AI across the region by driving digital literacy through the Gemini Academy for students, teachers and small and medium-sized businesses.
Key regional efforts include a partnership with True Corporation in Thailand to provide youth with tailored AI training alongside unlimited free internet access.
Concurrently, the Gemini app has been overhauled with a vibrant, fluid new design language called "Neural Expressive" and introduced Gemini Omni -- a multimodal feature that enables content creators, particularly in Singapore, to easily create and edit videos or custom avatars.
The next major shift for Gemini introduces secure, permission-based AI agents deeply integrated with apps like Gmail and Google Photos to automate information retrieval.
This powers two main features: Daily Brief, which analyses inboxes, calendars, and tasks overnight to compile a personalised morning digest of the day ahead, and Gemini Spark, a 24/7 companion that actively navigates daily life to take action on the user's behalf, such as scanning credit card statements to help prevent late fees or tracking important deadlines.
Gemini Spark recently began rolling out in English for Ultra subscribers, and it is expanding to include local Southeast Asian languages for Ultra users this week, with plans to make it available to a broader customer base in the future.
In Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, users can now go from brainstorming to browsing directly within the chat, complete with shoppable product listings, comparison tables, and pricing from across the web.
