AI chatbots are more popular than ever, and there are plenty of solid options to choose from besides OpenAI’s ChatGPT. One particularly strong competitor is Google's Gemini AI, which was once known as Google Bard. This artificial intelligence chatbot gets information from the Internet and runs the latest Gemini language model created by Google.
What is Google Gemini?
Bard (which the company now calls Gemini) is Google's answer to ChatGPT. It is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to respond to various queries and tasks while plugging into Google's search engine and receiving frequent updates. Like most other chatbots (including ChatGPT), Gemini can answer math questions and help write articles and documents, as well as most other tasks you'd expect a generative AI bot to complete.
What happened to Google Bard?
Nothing happened – Google just changed the name. Bard is now Gemini, and Gemini is Google's home for artificial intelligence. The company said it wanted to bring everything into an easy-to-follow ecosystem, which is why it felt the name change was important. You can still access Gemini through the old bard.google.com system, but it will now redirect you to gemini.google.com.
How does Gemini work?
Much like ChatGPT, Gemini is powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) and is designed to respond to your queries and requests with reasonable and human-like answers. Previously, Gemini used Google's PaLM 2 language model, but Google has since released updates adding Gemini 1.5 Flash and Gemini 1.5 Pro models, which are the search giant's most complex and powerful language models to date. Running Gemini with multiple language models allows Google to see how the bot is performing in many different ways. Gemini can be accessed on any device by visiting the chatbot's website, just like ChatGPT, and is also available on Android and iPhone via the Gemini app.
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Who can access Google Gemini?
Gemini is currently open to the public. Google is still developing the AI chatbot and hopes to continue improving it. Therefore, any response, query, or task submitted to Gemini can be reviewed by Google engineers to help the AI learn more from the questions you ask.
To get started with Gemini, just go to gemini.google.com and log in. Users who subscribe to Gemini Advanced have access to the latest and most powerful version of the AI language model. (More on that later.)
What languages does Gemini support?
Gemini 1.0 Pro currently supports more than 40 languages. Google has not revealed whether it plans to add more language support to the chatbot, but the Google support documentation states that it currently supports: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese.
Gemini 1.5 Pro supports 35 languages and is available in more than 150 different countries and regions. Supported languages include Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew English, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili Japanese, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
(Note: As of this writing, Google Gemini Advanced is only optimized for English. However, Google says it will still work with any language Gemini supports.)
What functions does Gemini have?
Like ChatGPT, Gemini can answer basic questions, help with coding, and solve complex mathematical equations. Additionally, Google added support for multimodal search in July, allowing users to enter images and text into conversations. This, along with the chatbot’s other features, enables it to complete reverse image searches. Google can also include images in its answers, which are pulled from the search giant's online results.
Google also previously added the ability to generate images in Gemini using its Imagen model. You can take advantage of this new feature by telling the bot to "create image." This makes the chatbot more competitive with OpenAI, which also provides image generation capabilities through DALL-E.
During Google I/O 2024, Google also showed off plans to expand multi-modal support for Gemini to include video and voice, allowing you to chat with AI chatbots in real time, similar to what we've seen with ChatGPT's new GPT -4o model.
Is Gemini connected to the internet?
Yes, Google Gemini is connected to the internet and trained on the latest information online. This is obviously a good advantage over ChatGPT, which just added full access to the internet in September and is only available to paying users who subscribe to its GPT-4 model.
How accurate is Google Gemini?
Now that the chatbot is using Gemini 1.0 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Pro, it is expected to be one of the most accurate chatbots on the web right now. However, Gemini's past experience suggests that the robot may hallucinate or take credit for information it finds through Google searches. This is something Google has been grappling with, and the company has managed to improve the results and how it's processed.
However, as with any chatbot, Gemini is still capable of creating inauthentic or plagiarized messages. Therefore, it is always recommended that you double-check any information provided by chatbots such as Gemini to ensure that it is original and accurate.
Is Gemini free to use?
Gemini is currently free to use, but Google also offers subscription-based plans that let you take advantage of its best artificial intelligence yet, Gemini Advanced. The service is part of Google's new Google One AI Premium plan, which currently costs $19.99 per month, which is comparable to ChatGPT Plus. Of course, the advantage here is that you also get access to 2TB of storage in Google Drive, as well as Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more. This feature was previously known as Duet AI, but has also been brought under the Gemini umbrella.
There is an app that can do this
Google also launched a dedicated Android Gemini mobile application. iPhone users can access Gemini through the Google app on iOS. Currently, the Gemini mobile app is only available on select devices and in English only in the United States. However, Google plans to expand the available countries and languages supported by the Gemini app in the future. Additionally, the mobile app supports many of the same features as Google Assistant, and Google is positioning it to replace Assistant with Gemini in the near future.
How does Gemini compare to ChatGPT?
Gemini is a strong competitor to ChatGPT, especially now that Gemini should return results more similar to those in GPT-4. The interfaces are very similar, and the functionality offered by both chatbots should handle most queries and tasks you throw at either of them.
Even with Google's paid plans, Gemini is still a more accessible option because its free model is more similar to GPT-4 than ChatGPT's free option. That said, OpenAI is starting to roll out the GPT-4o version to all users (even free users), but it will have usage restrictions and is not yet widely available.
Currently, Gemini has the least barriers to internet access and can use Google as its search engine. When ChatGPT is connected to the Internet, it uses Bing instead of Google as its search engine.
Google did share some information about how Gemini compares to GPT-4V, one of the latest versions of GPT-4, and said it actually achieved more accurate results in several areas. But since there are currently no reliable tests comparing the Gemini 1.5 Pro to GPT-4o, it's unclear how the two latest models from Google and OpenAI fare in a head-to-head comparison. Google Gemini 1.5 Pro does offer a maximum context token count of 1 million, so it can handle longer context documents than ChatGPT can now. Google isn't stopping there, as it plans to offer a version of Gemini that supports 2 million context tokens and is already testing it with developers.
Ultimately, it's hard to say exactly which one is better, as they both have their own merits. I recommend trying any task you want to accomplish in both and seeing which one best suits your needs. Also, keep in mind that some of the most impressive features offered by Gemini and ChatGPT are not yet fully available. For its part, Google is developing other AI-powered systems that it may include in Gemini. These include MusicLM, which uses AI to generate music, which the tech giant demonstrated at the 2024 Google I/O conference.
