AI chatbots are more popular than ever, and there are many solid options to choose from beyond OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A particularly forceful competitor is Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence, previously called Google Bard. This AI chatbot pulls information from the Internet and uses the latest Gemini language model created by Google.
What is Google Gemini?
Bard, or Gemini as the company currently calls it, is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It’s an AI chatbot designed to answer a variety of queries and tasks, all while connecting to Google Search and receiving recurrent updates. Like most other chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini can solve math problems and lend a hand you write articles and documents, among most other tasks you would expect from a generative AI bot.
What happened to Google Bard?
Source: Google / Joshua Hawkins
Nothing happened – Google just changed its name. Bard is now Gemini, and Gemini is Google’s home for all things AI. The company says it wanted to combine everything into one easy-to-understand ecosystem and that’s why it felt the name change was vital. You can still access Gemini through the elderly version bard.google.com system, but now it will redirect you to gemini.google.com.
How does Gemini work?
Like ChatGPT, Gemini works on the Massive Language Model (LLM) and aims to provide reasonable and human responses to your queries and requests. Previously, Gemini used the Google PaLM 2 language model, but Google has since released an update that adds Gemini 1.5 Flash AND Gemini 1.5 Pro models, the search giant’s most intricate and powerful language models. Launching Gemini with multiple language models allowed Google to see the bot in action in several different ways. Gemini can be accessed on any device by visiting the chatbot website, similar to ChatGPT, and on Android and iPhones via the Gemini app.
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Who can access Google Gemini?
Gemini is currently available to the general public. Google is still working on the AI chatbot and hopes to further improve it. Accordingly, any responses, inquiries or tasks submitted to Gemini can be checked by Google engineers to lend a hand the AI learn more from the questions you ask.
To start using Gemini, simply go to gemini.google.com and log in. Users who subscribe to Gemini Advanced can benefit from the latest and most powerful versions of the AI language model. (More on this later.)
What languages does Gemini support?
Gemini 1.0 Pro currently supports over 40 languages. Google hasn’t said yet whether it plans to add more language support to the chatbot, but a Google lend a hand document notes that it currently supports: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified/Time-honored), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Persian, 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 over 150 different countries and territories. Supported languages are Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified/established), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
(Note: At the time of writing, Google Gemini Advanced is only optimized for English. However, Google says it should still work with all languages supported by Gemini.)
What features does Gemini offer?
Like ChatGPT, Gemini can answer basic questions, lend a hand with coding, and solve intricate math equations. Additionally, In July, Google added support for multimodal search, allowing users to introduce photos and text into conversations. This, along with the chatbot’s other capabilities, allows it to perform full reverse image searches. Google may also include images in its responses 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 novel feature by telling the bot to “create an image.” This makes the chatbot more competitive with OpenAI, which also offers image generation via DALL-E.
At Google I/O 2024, Google also unveiled plans to expand Gemini’s multimodal support with video and voice, which will enable real-time chatting with the AI chatbot, similar to what we already see with the novel GPT ChatGPT Model -4o.
Is Gemini connected to the Internet?
Yes, Google Gemini is connected to the Internet and is trained with the latest and most up-to-date information found on the Internet. This is obviously a nice advantage over ChatGPT, which I just added full internet access in Septemberand only for paid users who subscribe to the GPT-4 model.
How exact is Google Gemini?
Now that the chatbot uses Gemini 1.0 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Pro, it is expected to be one of the most exact chatbots available on the internet today. However, past experience with Gemini have shown that the bot is likely to hallucinate or take credit for information found during a Google search. This is a problem that Google has been working to solve, and the company has managed to improve the results and the way they are handled.
However, like any chatbot, Gemini can still produce information that is false or plagiarized. As such, it is always advisable to double-check any information shared by chatbots like Gemini to ensure it is genuine and exact.
Is Gemini free to employ?
Gemini is currently free, but Google also offers a subscription-based plan that lets you employ its best AI yet, Gemini Advanced. The service is available as part of Google’s novel Google One AI premium plan, which currently costs $19.99 per month, putting it on par with ChatGPT Plus. The advantage, of course, is that you also get access to 2TB of Google Drive storage, as well as access to Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more. This feature was previously known as Duet AI, but has also been rounded up under the Gemini umbrella.
There’s an app for that
Google has also launched a dedicated Gemini mobile app for Android. iPhone users can access Gemini via Google application for iOS. Currently, the Gemini mobile app is only available on select devices and only supports US English. However, Google plans to expand the number of 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 plans to replace Assistant with Gemini in the near future.
How does Gemini compare to ChatGPT?
Gemini is a solid competitor to ChatGPT, especially now that Gemini should produce results more similar to those in GPT-4. The interface is very similar, and the functionality offered by both chatbots should handle most of the queries and tasks you throw at either of them.
Even on Google’s paid plan, Gemini is still a more accessible option because its free models are more similar to GPT-4 than the free ChatGPT option. That said, OpenAI is starting to make a version of GPT-4o available to all users, even free users, but it will have usage limits and is not yet widely available.
For now, Gemini poses the least barriers to Internet access and can employ Google as a search engine. When ChatGPT connects to the Internet, it uses Bing as the search engine instead of Google.
Google has provided some information on how to do this Gemini compared to GPT-4V, one of the latest versions of GPT-4, and found that it actually produces more exact results in several areas. However, since no reliable tests are yet available comparing Gemini 1.5 Pro with GPT-4o, it is unclear how exactly the two latest models from Google and OpenAI fare in a head-to-head comparison. Google Gemini 1.5 Pro offers a maximum context token count of one million, allowing it to support much longer context documents than ChatGPT currently does. And Google is not stopping there, because it plans to offer a Gemini version with support for two million context tokens, which it is already testing with developers.
Ultimately, it’s tough to say which one is better because they both have their strengths. I would recommend doing whatever task you want to do with both and then seeing which one best suits your needs. Also note that some of the most impressive features offered by Gemini and ChatGPT are not yet fully available. For its part, Google is working on other artificial intelligence-based systems that it could possibly include in Gemini in the future. They include MusicLMwhich uses artificial intelligence to generate music, as the tech giant demonstrated at Google I/O 2024.
