Gemini Live is now freely available to everyone
Google's Gemini Live is now freely available for everyone using Google's Gemini app in English, the company announced on Monday. Originally, Gemini Live was launched at the Pixel 9 event, but was originally available only for Pixel 9 devices, and it required a Gemini advanced subscription. In September, the company started rolling it out to a subset of Android users, and now it should be available to all users. Tweet may have been deleted
About Gemini Live
Gemini Live is a voice conversation feature for Google's smart assistant Gemini, allowing users to chat with Gemini for as long as they like. It offers a number of different voice options and is better at handling features of actual conversations such as pauses and interruptions. It also has context retention, meaning it will remember previous interactions, making subsequent conversations more meaningful.
Google's Gemini App
Google's Gemini app is only available for Android right now. It's not inconceivable, however, that it one day comes to Apple's iOS as well. Apple's Craig Federighi mentioned the possibility in June, saying that Gemini is "maybe" coming to iOS in the future, along with other AI models. Google has started rolling out Gemini-generated smart replies for Gmail, which are more detailed and have more context than its old version of smart replies.
Partnership with Snap
Snap has entered into an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to power generative AI experiences within Snapchat's My AI chatbot. The chatbot will leverage the multimodal capabilities of Google's Gemini AI to enable the chatbot to understand different types of information, like text, audio, images, and videos. Gemini is powering the Google Lens-like features that Snapchat announced at its annual Snap Partner Summit last week.
Waymo and Public Ride-Hailing
Waymo has gotten one step closer to a commercial launch in Austin by early 2025. This week, the company will open its fully autonomous ride-hailing service to certain members of the public in the city as it gears up to partner with Uber next year. The initial riders will have 24/7 access to the service via the Waymo One app until Waymo transitions fully to the Uber app.
Instant and Firebase
Instant wants to recapture some of the magic of the pre-Google-acquisition Firebase by building a modern, Postgres-based open source version of it. Like the original Firebase, San Francisco-based Instant focuses on giving front-end developers easy access to a real-time database with offline capabilities without the need to manage any of the back-end architecture. Instant was founded by former roommates Joe Averbukh (CEO) and Stepan Parunashvili, who previously worked at companies like Wit.ai, Facebook, Airbnb, and others. It also monitors steps, calories, heart rate and sleep for way less than an Apple Watch or other popular wearables.
Juno and Vision Pro
Juno, the popular app that brought YouTube videos to Apple’s Vision Pro, is shutting down, its developer announced on Tuesday. As YouTube had not launched its own app for Vision Pro, Juno filled an important hole in the app ecosystem, by allowing users to watch videos in the immersive environment and interact with the player using gestures to do things like resize windows and or scrub through a video. Built by indie developer Christian Selig, best known for his now-shuttered Apollo app for Reddit, Juno launched shortly after the Vision Pro’s arrival in February 2024.
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