This year’s Pixel flagships are the first to let you talk with Gemini on the phone like you would a friend.
This feature – called Gemini Live – is rolling out to Google customers from this week. Technically, you don’t even need to buy one of the new Pixel phones to try it. It’s contained entirely within the existing Gemini App, though it does require an active Google One AI Premium subscription to access.
Assuming you make it to the other side of that $32.99 per month price-tag, you’ll find what might be Google’s most impressive AI-powered experience to date.
Where the Google Assistant relied on a robotic back-and-forth, Gemini Live allows for a more free-flowing and natural level of interaction with the prompt-based chatbot. There’s still a smidge of latency in the mix, but what’s here is leagues ahead of where the Google Assistant was in terms of how reactive and dynamic it feels.
Nevertheless, there are countless edge-cases where the tech falls flat. For instance, it wasn’t able to crawl my emails and help me find a specific receipt or how much I’ve spent on Uber over the past twelve months. Although these kinds of ecosystem adjacent use cases sort-of work in Gemini proper, they don’t currently work with Gemini Live.
Is it useful or cool that anyone with a web browser can pull up Google’s AI chatbot in a pinch? Absolutely! Like most Google services outside of search, it’s something that most people probably won’t make that much use of on a daily basis, let alone something that they might be willing to shell out for yet another subscription to access.
Fortunately, if you pick up the new Google Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL or Pixel 9 Pro Fold then you won’t have to worry about that part. At least for next year. All three devices come with a free twelve month subscription to Google’s One AI Premium plan.
With more and more AI businesses putting up paywalls in a bid to make the economics of the sector make more sense, that’s a pretty shameless powerplay on Google’s part.
It’s been less than a week since the search engine got sledged in a US courtroom over its anti competitive practices, so it’s almost funny that the company opted to include such a blatant expression of that same monopoly power here. The original Pixel got a lot of mileage out of launching with unlimited free high quality image backups via Google Photos. It seems obvious that Google is keen to follow the same playbook when it comes to Gemini and the Pixel 9 Pro.
You only need to walk into a university, apply for a job or open up social media to know that the question of whether accessible AI-powered tech and apps will change our world has already been answered. Just how many people are willing to pay for it, how much that market is worth and which companies dominate it is a more open-ended affair.
Remove a few of the barriers between everyday consumers and the best version of Gemini available and you probably expose the service to some amount of potential new customers. You become the default for those who aren’t all that invested in AI or even just a little bit curious about it.
Ultimately, if you’re scratching your head wondering who in their right mind would pay $32 per month for a better version of Gemini and a bunch of AI apps then the obvious answer is that you’re probably not in the segment of the market that Google is looking to lure in with this particular offer.
This, I think, probably encompasses most consumers.
At least part of the reason why is that while AI chatbots like Gemini can do things that are technically impressive, they don’t really solve any everyday problems. Also, the experience of using it in public can be pretty cringe.
Even as someone who enjoys messing around with Gemini Live, I feel like I have to walk into a different part of my apartment to my partner if I’m going to use it for anything more than a quick query. I would not be impressed if someone in my office or on public transport started using this tech in front of me and I doubt I’m the only one who feels this way.
In some ways, it’s not unlike virtual reality. The tech involved is cool, but the real-world experience of using it can be uncomfortable, cringeworthy and isolating. Given those constraints, it’s little surprise that the market for VR has ended up being a lot smaller than early adopters and investors expected.
Reporting by The Washington Post in 2023 suggested that Meta Quest VR headset owners stopped using the hardware after just a few weeks. It is not hard to imagine myself (or others) growing tired of Gemini Live on a similar timescale.
AI may well follow that same trajectory and if you are an enthusiast for it then having one subscription that ticks more than a few of those boxes (and includes some cloud storage as a bonus) probably makes a lot of sense. Chances are, the users that are willing to pay for Gemini are already paying a lot more for the same level of AI-powered utility elsewhere.
Right now, the AI app landscape is a fragmented mess with a myriad of startups trying to carve out and hold onto their respective niche from Grammarly to ChatGPT. Regardless of how big the current hype bubble gets, it’s eventually going to burst. This has happened with every wave of AI investment to date, so it's difficult to imagine a world where this one doesn’t end the same way.
Whenever that happens, a lot of these AI companies are going to struggle to survive the subsequent vibe shift. They’ll suddenly have to make money selling AI apps and services in a landscape where the big players like Google simply don’t.
For as much as AI-powered search is being touted as the first real threat to Google’s core business in decades, the reality is that any potential new competitor in that space would face the same headwinds that have deterred existing and older ones as well as the inevitable shock of the AI bubble bursting.
Again, VR might be a helpful example here. When the last wave of virtual reality hype was at its peak, the advent of the metaverse was touted as a game-changer for the hierarchy of power in the tech world and a platform-shift on par with the arrival of the iPhone.
The problem with that myth is that AI chatbots are just as inescapably cringe as VR.
The likes of Gemini Live might be smarter, faster, more accurate and (in some cases) genuinely useful. That said, betting on a world where consumers not only want to trap themselves in an endless call-center of their own making but are willing to pay a premium for the privilege doesn’t seem like a very good gamble.
Gemini Live might do a great job of picking up where Google Assistant left off, but this fresh vision of voice-led computing doesn’t feel any closer to being a real business that appeals to anyone but AI advocates and business-brained boosters.
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