Gemini Live is finally available. Here’s how you can access it (and why you’ll want to)

One of generative AI‘s most useful (and needed) applications is enhancing voice assistants, which have remained relatively unchanged for years. Now, Google is making several upgrades to its voice assistant experience with the help of Gemini. 

At the company’s Made by Google event on Tuesday, Google made Gemini its default voice assistant, replacing Google Assistant with a smarter alternative that can be interrupted, is aware of your Google apps, and can even help answer questions about the contents of your screen. 

Also: Google tops the Index with Gemini Live and Pixel’s AI features

Arguably the biggest Gemini announcement is that Google made Gemini Live available three months after announcing it at Google I/O. 

Gemini Live is an advanced voice assistant that can have human-like, multi-turn (or exchanges), verbal conversations on complex topics and even give you advice. For example, when speaking to the assistant, you can interrupt it mid-sentence, and the assistant will still understand you. You can also pick from multiple voices to enhance your conversation experience.

However, there’s a catch: only Gemini Advanced subscribers on Android devices can access it. The feature is already being rolled out to both Samsung and Pixel devices. 

As a bonus, Pixel Pro 9 users get access to the Google One AI Premium Plan, which includes access to Gemini Advanced — and, therefore, Gemini Live — at no additional cost for the first year. But for all other Android users, it’s hard to say whether Gemini Live is worth paying $20 per month for a Google One AI Premium Plan. If you want to see whether the plan is worth it, you can try it for free via a one-month trial. 

Also: How to try Google’s new Gemini Live AI assistant for free

When announced at Google I/O, Gemini Live also had multimodal capabilities, which allowed it to use the camera to see the world around you and ingest that as context for answers. That feature, however, has not been released yet. 

Gemini Live is a direct competitor to GPT-4o’s new and improved Voice Mode, which has the same conversational and multimodal capabilities. Like Google, OpenAI has yet to make video and screen-sharing capabilities available.