In January, Gemini Live gained a “Talk Live about this” feature, and it should now be more widely available on Android.
Previously, Gemini Live only accepted voice input, but “Talk Live about” expands this to:
- Images: Upload image from Gallery or use Camera and tap the “Talk Live about this” chip, but screenshots taken with “Ask about screen” do not work
- Files: Upload file, or open PDF in Files by Google (or Samsung Notes) and activate Gemini overlay. Supported formats include TXT, DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, and HWP.
- YouTube: Open Gemini overlay with player active or paste YouTube link into Gemini app. “For any YouTube video up to 2 hours long, you can ask Gemini Live about anything that’s mentioned in the captions of the video.”
Afterwards, the fullscreen Gemini Live interface opens with a preview of the image, file, or video. You can proceed to ask questions and get answers with that specific context in mind.
In January, this rolled out to the Pixel 9, Galaxy S24, and S25. With the March 2025 Feature Drop, Google brought it to “Pixel 6 and newer.” Availability has slowly ramped up in recent weeks. As of today, we’re seeing on older Pixel and Samsung devices with the free Gemini tier.
Additionally, Google has widely rolled out the more compact Gemini Live buttons that remove the text labels. As of yesterday, we’re seeing it on the latest stable Google app (version 16.11).
In other Gemini news today for developers, 2.5 Pro has entered “public preview in the Gemini API in Google AI Studio.” (“Vertex AI rolling out shortly.”) Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 allows developers to access increased rate limits as they build applications powered by the new model. Gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 remains “available for free with lower rate limits.”
This comes 10 days after Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental’s launch to Advanced users, with free access coming last Saturday.
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