Google’s Gemini AI now has its own iPhone app

In the AI chatbot world, ubiquity is everything. Companies person raced to build desktop and mobile apps for their bots, successful bid to some springiness them caller capabilities but besides to marque definite they’re close successful beforehand of your look arsenic often arsenic possible. 

There’s nary amended illustration of that than Google’s new Gemini app for iPhone, which softly deed the App Store astir the satellite this week. The escaped app is elemental and straightforward: it’s conscionable a chat model and a database of your erstwhile chats. You tin query the bot with text, voice, oregon your camera, and it’ll springiness you answers. It’s efficaciously identical to the Gemini conception of the Google app, oregon what you’d get by opening a browser and going to the Gemini website. 

The Gemini app does person 1 newish feature: entree to Gemini Live, the bot’s much interactive and conversational chat mode that is akin to ChatGPT’s dependable mode. Gemini Live has been disposable connected Android for a fewer weeks, but this is the archetypal spot it has been usable for iPhone owners. In my abbreviated tests truthful acold it works truly well, and erstwhile you’re utilizing Live it shows up some successful the iPhone’s Dynamic Island and connected your lockscreen.

But Live volition yet beryllium everywhere. Whenever the adjacent mentation of Gemini comes out, that volition beryllium too. The full constituent of the Gemini app is to enactment the icon connected your homescreen, and springiness you thing to delegate to the Action Button oregon 1 of the different quick-access spots connected your phone. With 1 pat and fractional a second, you tin beryllium chatting with the bot. That access, and the musculus representation it helps build, are important for immoderate institution that wants users to marque a wont retired of chatting with bots.

Like each the different non-Siri chatbots, Gemini has immoderate large limitations connected your phone. It can’t alteration settings oregon entree different apps. But it can entree different Google apps, which continues to beryllium Gemini’s large advantage. You tin inquire Gemini to play music, and it’ll occurrence up YouTube Music. You tin inquire it for directions and it’ll nonstop you to Google Maps. It’s a tiny glimpse of what Gemini hopes to beryllium connected Android, and what Apple’s trying to bash with Siri: usage AI to marque everything connected your telephone a littler much interactive and accessible. But nary of that matters if radical don’t usage the bots — and truthful the contention for your homescreen is on.