Google brings AI voice assistant Gemini Live to iPhone

By Kenrick Cai

SAN FRANCISCO - Alphabet's Google on Thursday released a smartphone app for its artificial intelligence chatbot on Apple's App Store that introduced the latest generation of its voice assistant to the popular mobile operating system.

The new Gemini app will include Gemini Live, a voice-based feature that allows users to have natural conversations with the chatbot. Apple has already said it will incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT into a refreshed version of its voice assistant, Siri.

"It’s great for when you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm and develop creative ideas," Brian Marquardt, a senior director of product management at Google, said in a statement.

Gemini is Google's answer to ChatGPT, the popular application developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Google initially launched it in February 2023 under the name Bard, and has since added more capabilities while weathering controversies.

Google announced the voice feature during an August event and first added it to phones powered by its own mobile operating system, Android.

Technical advances in AI spurred by the rise of large language models have fostered the emergence of a new generation of voice assistants far more capable than Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant.

Google's Gemini Live is a replacement of Assistant, an eight-year-old product built using older AI technology.

Hundreds of employees on the Voice Assistant team were laid off in January as part of a reorganization to "become more efficient," a company spokesperson said at the time.

Google has since consolidated further. Last month it folded the Gemini app team into DeepMind, its AI research lab, in a move that CEO Sundar Pichai also attributed to increasing efficiency.

DeepMind is among the research organizations implementing new techniques to improve AI models as the traditional approach of building ever-bigger models has run in to unexpected delays and challenges, Reuters reported this week.

(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)