Google’s AI chatbot Bard is now called Gemini: Here’s what it can do

The search giant said that its AI chatbot Bard is now known as Gemini and launched free and paid mobile apps in the United States.

Tech giant Google has announced that its artificial intelligence chatbot known as Bard has now been officially rebranded as Gemini with a mobile app launch in the United States. 

On Feb. 8, vice president and general manager for Google Assistant and Bard, Sissie Hsiao, announced that the firm’s 11-month-old AI chatbot has now adopted the same name as its multimodal large language model.

Gemini represents Google’s most advanced large language AI model (LLM) called Ultra 1.0. The firm claims that the AI is “far more capable at highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions, and collaborating on creative projects.”

According to the company blog post, the premium version of the chatbot, Gemini Advanced, allows longer, more detailed conversations and a better understanding of context from previous prompts. It can be a personal tutor, help with advanced coding, and brainstorm creative projects.

Gemini Advanced is available through the new Google One AI Premium subscription for $20 per month, and it will soon be integrated into Google services such as Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

The new mobile app for Gemini launched on Android and Apple iOS in the United States on Feb. 8 and the firm stated that it will be available in more locations and languages soon.

The mobile version of Gemini can generate captions for photos, answer questions about articles, make calls, control smart home devices, and aims to be a conversational, multimodal AI assistant.

“We’re working with local regulators to make sure that we’re abiding by local regime requirements before we can expand,” said Hsiao.

In a separate blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed the technology underlying Gemini Advanced will eventually be able to outthink even the smartest people when tackling many complex topics.

“The largest model Ultra 1.0 is the first to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects — including math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics.”

Related: Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT go head-to-head in Cointelegraph test

Gemini faces some stiff competition. Microsoft-backed OpenAI released the first version of ChatGPT in November 2022 and upgraded it with GPT-4 in March 2023.

When Gemini was announced in December, Google claimed its Ultra version achieved “state-of-the-art performance” across 30 out of 32 academic benchmarks used in large language model development.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 8, it was reported that Google is joining an effort to develop “nutrition labels” for digital content that identify how it was produced or altered, including with AI.

The firm will work with Adobe, BBC, Microsoft, Sony, and others on technical standards for these digital credentials through the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).