With generative AI now part of our lives, the next step is to enable it to have more natural conversations. As revealed during the company’s Made by Google event, Google’s Gemini chatbot has finally reached that stage.

Google has unveiled a new voice chat feature for its AI assistant Gemini, called Gemini Live. This feature is exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers and allows users to have conversations with the AI, similar to ChatGPT’s voice chat feature. Like ChatGPT, which introduced its slightly spooky voice chat feature with the launch of GPT-4o, Gemini Live offers “seamless,” human-like conversations where you can pause, pause, and resume interactions. The feature even works when the phone is locked or in the background. This was first hinted at Google’s I/O conference, where the ability to interpret video in real time was also hinted at.

You can choose from 10 new voices for Gemini, with names like Ursa and Dipper – we don’t have access to all of the voices on our devices, but you can try them out for yourself when the feature comes to your phone. The feature is rolling out in English for Android devices, with iOS support and additional languages ​​expected in the coming weeks.

In addition to Gemini Live, Google has announced further improvements to its AI assistant. New extensions for apps like Keep, Tasks, Utilities and YouTube Music are on the horizon. In addition, Gemini will gain contextual awareness of your screen, similar to Apple’s AI features announced at WWDC. This will allow you to search for information about on-screen content and even extract details like travel destinations from videos to add to Google Maps.

If you want to try these out, they should land on your phone soon, although we wouldn’t be surprised if Google rolls them out to its most premium phones first. You’ll also need Gemini Advanced, which is offered as part of Google’s most premium One subscription and costs $19.99 per month.

Source: Google (1, 2), The Verge