Google's Gemini chatbot gets highly anticipated updates. Here's what it means for you

Ever since Google released the first iteration of Gemini, then known as Bard, the AI chatbot has gone through several iterations in attempts to compete with giants like ChatGPT. Now, Google is at it again, giving Gemini a facelift with an LLM upgrade and other highly anticipated features.

On Thursday, Google announced the chatbot Gemini is now powered by a new LLM version, Gemini 1.5 Flash, which will give users faster and higher-quality responses, especially around reasoning and image comprehension, according to the company’s blog post.

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Google also quadrupled the free version of Gemini’s context window to 32K tokens. This is a meaningful update because bigger context windows help chatbots remember more information simultaneously, leading to better-informed responses.

Bigger context windows also allow chatbots to accept more information to process in a conversation, including text characters or multimodal inputs such as documents and photos. Indeed, Google plans to add the ability to upload files from your Google Drive account or your device “soon” so that you can make the most use of the larger context window.

Document uploading is arguably one of the most helpful features an AI chatbot can offer since it helps you answer questions and get summaries of documents you interact with daily. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude already offer this feature for free. In another attempt to catch up with ChatGPT, Gemini will also “soon” be able to analyze data files, provide insights about them, and visualize them through charts and graphics.

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Beyond the Flash 1.5 upgrades, Google added other updates to improve Gemini, including displaying Google links next to relevant content to help users fact-check the responses. This addresses one of the biggest issues I had with Gemini. Before this update, to double-check your answer, you had to wait again to get the links, disrupting the seamless and quick experience chatbots should provide.

As part of this wave of updates, Google has also expanded who can access Gemini and some of its features. Today, Google is rolling out Gemini in Google Messages to the European Economic Area (EEA), and the Gemini app is now available in more countries.

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In the coming weeks, Google also plans to expand Gemini access globally to teens who meet the minimum age requirement to manage their own Google account. To address concerns regarding younger adults’ use of the technology, Google has added more safeguards, including a teen-specific onboarding process. 

Adding all these features should make Gemini a more competitive chatbot. ZDNET plans to test Gemini again to see if the updates earn it a higher spot on the best AI chatbots list.