Some of these Gemini features will be coming to users of Android and Google’s web apps for free, but others (and the more powerful feature sets) will be available via paid subscription. Google’s $20 a month AI Premium service has been renamed to Google AI Pro, and the cost stays the same, though it now comes with more limited features. Google AI Ultra, the company’s full suite of AI services, has increased to $250 per month. That’s $50 per month more expensive than OpenAI’s similar full-suite plan, ChatGPT Pro
Gemini Is an Artist, Actually
Creative professionals and programmers take note: Google’s enhancements to its creative tools will either make your job easier and more productive, or it will render you obsolete.
Jules is an “asynchronous coding agent” that aims to let you take a rough design scribbled on a napkin and turn it into a full-fledged illustration or code, while showing you the work it did along the way.
There’s also a new version of Google’s AI image generator called Imagen 4 that Google claims can generate much more detail in images, like textures in AI-generated paintings or custom text in music posters.
Courtesy of Google
Courtesy of Google
Google also has some new generative AI video tools, like Flow, a tool made specifically for AI movie creation. It lets you upload photos or illustrations of characters, props, or scenery, then animate it all into a short movie using text prompts. If you don’t have photos, you can just type a generative prompt to make the visuals right inside Flow. Then you build a narrative video scene by scene by describing the action in a text box. The company illustrated Flow by showing a generated video of an old man using a giant chicken in the backseat to make his car fly. The video didn’t look that great, and weirdly plastic, but it got the point across.
Also included in the update is an enhanced video generator called Veo 3 that Google says has a better understanding of material physics for smoother and more lifelike animations.
Search Goes Full AI Mode
Last year at I/O, Google unleashed its AI Overviews enhancement to search results, a feature that summarizes results from across the web at the top of the screen for some queries. The results were famously varied, from being just plain busted to having hilarious hallucinations to showing actual plagiarism. Nevertheless, Google is now giving its search experience an even shinier AI sheen.
To that end, Google is making search much more chatbot-oriented with its new AI Mode. This search feature was first announced in March 2025 as an experiment, and now it’s available within the default Google search experience for everyone in the US. AI Mode appears in a tab within your search results, so you can switch over to it with a click if it’s available.
