HOW TO... Master Google’s Gemini AI chatbot
By Nik Rawlinson
What you need: Web browser; Gemini app Time required: One hour
O
penAI’s ChatGPT is the best-known AI chatbot, but it has plenty of impressive rivals. One is Google’s Gemini, which you might have come across in a previous incarnation when it was known as Bard.
Both Gemini and ChatGPT use what’s known as a large language model (LLM) to generate answers. An LLM is a huge pool of unstructured data, such as books, news stories, translations, film scripts and so on, which the AI uses to generate its written output. It can also use this data to answer questions, which is why you can ask an AI service just about anything and get a convincing answer.
Like ChatGPT, Gemini has free and paid-for versions. Many of its core capabilities are free, as we’ll explain here. The paid-for edition, called Gemini Advanced, lets you use it in Google Drive. It also has ‘Gems’, which are small programs that perform specific tasks. You can add as many as you like to a premium account by clicking the diamond logo in the Gemini sidebar.
To use Gemini Advanced, you’ll need to upgrade your Google Account to at least the £18.99-per-month AI Premium plan (www.snipca.com/53956). This also increases your Google storage to a massive 2TB and adds other features including Fitbit Premium (www.snipca. com/53957), and face-detection and 30 days of video history for Nest cameras.