Google Gemini

Google Gemini is Google's flagship AI assistant, built by Google DeepMind and accessible at gemini.google.com, on mobile, and across the Google ecosystem. The product began life as Bard, which Google launched in March 2023 as a rushed response to ChatGPT's breakout success. On February 8, 2024, Google rebranded Bard entirely as Gemini, taking the name of its newer, more capable multimodal model family, and introduced a dedicated mobile app alongside a paid tier (originally "Gemini Advanced," now called Google AI Pro). After early stumbles, including a widely publicized 2024 image-generation controversy and a period of investor skepticism, Gemini staged a significant comeback: the app surpassed 900 million monthly active users by Google I/O in May 2026, up from roughly 400 million a year earlier, making it the second-largest AI assistant behind ChatGPT.

The current app is powered by the Gemini 3 model family, including Gemini 3.1 Pro (the flagship reasoning model), Gemini 3 Deep Think, and the fast, cost-efficient Gemini 3.5 and 3.6 Flash models used on the free tier. Beyond standard chat, Gemini includes Deep Research, which analyzes hundreds of sources in real time to produce comprehensive, cited reports; Canvas, a live collaborative editor for documents and code that sits alongside the chat; and Gems, which let users build custom, task-specific versions of Gemini for recurring workflows. The app also supports native image generation and editing (Nano Banana Pro), video generation (Veo 3.1), Gemini Live for real-time voice conversation and screen sharing, and a growing set of proactive features like Daily Brief and, on the Ultra tier, the experimental Gemini Spark agent. A defining technical strength is Gemini's very large context window, up to 1 million tokens on Pro models, letting it process entire codebases, lengthy documents, or hours of video in a single prompt.

Gemini's biggest structural advantage is its integration across products billions of people already use daily, including Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Docs, and Workspace. Pricing is split into distinct tiers: Free ($0, Gemini 3.6 Flash access with varying 3.1 Pro access), Google AI Plus ($4.99/month, 2x Free usage), Google AI Pro ($19.99/month, 4x Free usage, Deep Research, 1M context, 5TB storage), and Google AI Ultra (starting at $99.99/month for 5x Pro usage, up to $199.99/month for 20x Pro usage, Deep Think, and priority access to newest features). Consumer subscriptions are entirely separate from Gemini API developer billing, which is priced and managed independently through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI for teams building their own applications on top of the underlying models.

Gemini is free with any Google Account ($0/month), including access to Gemini 3.6 Flash, varying access to 3.1 Pro, image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas, Gems, and 15GB of shared Google storage. Google AI Plus costs $4.99/month, offering 2x higher usage limits than Free, 200 Google Flow video credits, more Nano Banana access in Search, Gemini in Gmail/Vids, early access to Gemini in Chrome, and 400GB storage. Google AI Pro costs $19.99/month, offering 4x higher usage limits, 1,000 Google Flow credits, higher access to Gemini 3 Pro and Deep Search, higher Jules coding agent limits, entry-level Google Antigravity access, Gemini in Gmail/Docs/Vids, YouTube Premium Lite, and 5TB storage. Google AI Ultra starts at $99.99/month (5x Pro's usage limits) or $199.99/month (20x Pro's usage limits), adding Deep Think, priority access to Gemini Spark (US only), 10,000-25,000 Google Flow credits, highest Jules and Antigravity limits, Project Genie, YouTube Premium individual, and storage starting at 20TB. All paid plans are available in 140+ countries; Gemini API usage for developers is billed completely separately through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.