Gemini Live launched earlier this week, with a focus on offering a "free-flowing, hands-free conversation" with the chatbot. It is Google's answer to ChatGPT Voice and lets users talk to Gemini as if it were a human, including interrupting it mid-flow.
Initially, Gemini Live is available to anyone with a modern Android handset, a $19 per month Gemini Advanced subscription and language settings set to English. Google said during its keynote it would be available immediately — but it isn't that simple.
Some users who meet those requirements found themselves unable to get access to the voice assistant feature. We asked and Google told Tom's Guide that while it has launched, it would slowly roll out over "the coming weeks".
So, when can you expect to brainstorm ideas with your new chatbot bestie? It's hard to say but probably before the end of September. In the meantime, you might want to consider whether the Gemini Advanced subscription is really worth the price.
'Gradual' rollout planned for Gemini Live
While it's natural that it'd start life on Google's own Android platform, Google also confirmed it will be coming to iOS and non-English speaking users, but didn't say exactly when that would happen beyond "the coming weeks". It is likely the Android rollout will have to be completed before it comes to iOS.
Even when the rollout is complete, it won't be the full, final version of Gemini Live with vision capabilities. That's because at present, Gemini Live will be audio-only, with multimodal capabilities slated for later this year, including an AI view through your phone's camera.
Thankfully you can interrupt Gemini's voice mid-flow, something OpenAI's Advanced Voice update has offered to a very small percentage of users. Although, unlike Advanced Voice, Gemini Live still has to convert speech-to-text, send it to the AI and convert the AI's text responses back to speech. Advanced voice is speech-to-speech.
Google hasn't yet said anything about a free Gemini option, however, so that $ 19-a-month membership is likely to be your best bet when it comes to features being added, even if the free version outperformed the paid model in our testing.
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