Google’s generative AI chatbot has been given a name change and a promotion, ready to take over from Google Assistant as the main way to interact with the company’s services. Whether most people need a creativity-focused assistant constantly at their beck and call remains up for debate.

The chatbot formerly known as Bard has been renamed Gemini, which is the same name given to the underlying Google large language model that powers it. You can talk to Gemini through a web browser, but it’s also coming soon to the Google app on iPhones.

Google says Gemini can help with everything from creating learning plans to writing text messages.

More notably, a new Gemini app for Android (which is rolling out gradually and has not hit Australia yet) provides a dedicated space for Google’s chatbot on smartphones for the first time and even allows you to use Gemini as your default voice-activated helper in place of Google Assistant.

This is all just the start of Google’s plans to put generative AI at the heart of many of its products.

An experimental version of the company’s search engine currently uses the technology to give specific answers rather than a list of web results; Gemini is being integrated into enterprise deployments of Google Cloud and Workspaces for applications such as fixing code or drafting emails; and a new tier of Google One gives consumers access to the most powerful Gemini model for $33 per month.

While that most powerful model is touted as being far more capable at reasoning and creative collaboration, the standard version you can use for free is still impressive. It can give advice, answer questions, generate images and analyse images you upload to answer questions about them. It can even check with other services like YouTube and Google Maps if it needs to. The question is, how many people will want or need to use it regularly throughout the day?

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, Microsoft’s Bing and many other AI features from companies including Samsung and Meta, Google’s models are evolving rapidly. Gemini is positioned as a next-generation creative helper who can reason, understand, and summarise. But in practice, all of these technological developments can feel like experiments that excel at creating surface-level illusions of human creativity – sentences that are easy to read, images that look like photos at a glance – with a litany of errors or misunderstandings under the surface.