Google Bard becomes ‘Gemini’ on Android app on February 7th

Google Bard is set to undergo a major transformation in the coming days, with an early changelog revealing a “Gemini” rebrand coming next week, along with a new Android app and more.

Over the past few months, Google has been rapidly building Bard, a generative AI chat experience with new features. Last year, Bard was upgraded with “Gemini” as a behind-the-scenes model, and more recently added an image generator. But all the while, Google has been working on big changes to Bard.

As we reported earlier this week, evidence discovered through Android and the Bard web experience suggests that Google is considering rebranding Bard to “Gemini,” to match the name of the base model that powers it. I showed that. Now, an early changelog for Bard spotted by Dylan Roussel indicates that changes are coming this week.

The changelog, currently dated February 7th, directly says “Bird is now Gemini,” and also provides some insight into Google’s reasoning. As announced this week, ‘Gemini Pro’ now powers Bard in all countries and languages ​​where Bard is available. Google says the rebranding is meant to better align with this.

We’re working to give everyone direct access to Google AI, and as of this week, all Gemini users in supported countries and languages ​​can now access Google’s best AI model family . To better reflect this commitment, we have changed the name of Bard to Gemini.

Besides the name change, Google also notes in the changelog that access to “Gemini Advanced” will also be available starting February 7th. The “Advanced” tier will be announced in December 2023 and is built on the most capable “Gemini Ultra”. Google’s model. We also reported that it will be paid for while adding some additional features. Google’s changelog notes that this is a paid product and offers more, including “enhanced multimodal features,” better coding support, and “the ability to upload files, documents, data, and more for deeper analysis.” It is directly mentioned that the functionality will be expanded. ”

After being rebranded from Bard, Google Gemini will also offer an Android app.

Google explains:

Learn in new ways, write thank-you notes, plan events, and more with Google AI on your phone. Gemini integrates with Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube, so you can easily get things done on your phone. You can interact through text, audio, and images.

To chat with Gemini on Android, download the Gemini app from the Google Play Store. On iOS, try Gemini in the Google app.

There is currently no preview for this app, but previous evidence we’ve reported suggests that this “app” will work very similar to the current experience of using Google Assistant on Android. In particular, it turns out that his current Google Assistant “app” available from the Play Store (which is essentially just a home screen shortcut) has been updated to be called “Gemini.” Last month, we also shared screenshots of an early version of the experience, including the settings menu.

Google’s changelog states that the app will only be available on “select devices.” We reported a few months ago that in the US this could only be his Pixel and Galaxy S24 with Tensor, but it’s listed in English. It has also expanded to include “Japanese, Korean, and English worldwide, excluding the United Kingdom, Switzerland, European Economic Area countries and associated territories,” with more countries and languages ​​to follow.

And finally, Google Gemini is expanding to Canada on February 7th. Bard never launched in this region, and Canada is one of the only major regions he doesn’t have support for.

As always with these early changelogs, things may change slightly between now and official announcement, including the actual dates. That being said, it’s clear that things are building rapidly for this launch.

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