Tag Archives: GenerativeAI

Gemini 1.5 Pro Now Available in 180+ Countries; With Native Audio Understanding, System Instructions, JSON Mode and More

Posted by Jaclyn Konzelmann and Megan Li - Google Labs

Grab an API key in Google AI Studio, and get started with the Gemini API Cookbook

Less than two months ago, we made our next-generation Gemini 1.5 Pro model available in Google AI Studio for developers to try out. We’ve been amazed by what the community has been able to debug, create and learn using our groundbreaking 1 million context window.

Today, we’re making Gemini 1.5 Pro available in 180+ countries via the Gemini API in public preview, with a first-ever native audio (speech) understanding capability and a new File API to make it easy to handle files. We’re also launching new features like system instructions and JSON mode to give developers more control over the model’s output. Lastly, we’re releasing our next generation text embedding model that outperforms comparable models. Go to Google AI Studio to create or access your API key, and start building.


Unlock new use cases with audio and video modalities

We’re expanding the input modalities for Gemini 1.5 Pro to include audio (speech) understanding in both the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. Additionally, Gemini 1.5 Pro is now able to reason across both image (frames) and audio (speech) for videos uploaded in Google AI Studio, and we look forward to adding API support for this soon.


screen grab of a clooege professor using Gemini 1.5 Pro to create a quiz based on their latest lecture video in Google AI Studio
You can upload a recording of a lecture, like this 117,000+ token lecture from Jeff Dean, and Gemini 1.5 Pro can turn it into a quiz with an answer key. Video sped up for demo purposes.

Gemini API Improvements

Today, we’re addressing a number of top developer requests:

1. System instructions: Guide the model’s responses with system instructions, now available in Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. Define roles, formats, goals, and rules to steer the model's behavior for your specific use case.

image showing where System Instructions is located in Google AI Studio
Set System Instructions easily in Google AI Studio

2. JSON mode: Instruct the model to only output JSON objects. This mode enables structured data extraction from text or images. You can get started with cURL, and Python SDK support is coming soon.

3. Improvements to function calling: You can now select modes to limit the model’s outputs, improving reliability. Choose text, function call, or just the function itself.


A new embedding model with improved performance

Starting today, developers will be able to access our next generation text embedding model via the Gemini API. The new model, text-embedding-004, (text-embedding-preview-0409 in Vertex AI), achieves a stronger retrieval performance and outperforms existing models with comparable dimensions, on the MTEB benchmarks.

table showing Gecko: Versativel Text Embeddings Distilled from Large Language Models
'Text-embedding-004' (aka Gecko) using 256 dims output outperforms all larger 768 dim output models on MTEB benchmarks

These are just the first of many improvements coming to the Gemini API and Google AI Studio in the next few weeks. We’re continuing to work on making Google AI Studio and the Gemini API the easiest way to build with Gemini. Get started today in Google AI Studio with Gemini 1.5 Pro, explore code examples and quickstarts in our new Gemini API Cookbook, and join our community channel on Discord.

Android Studio uses Gemini Pro to make Android development faster and easier

Posted by Sandhya Mohan – Product Manager, Android Studio

As part of the next chapter of our Gemini era, we announced we were bringing Gemini to more products. Today we’re excited to announce that Android Studio is using the Gemini 1.0 Pro model to make Android development faster and easier, and we’ve seen significant improvements in response quality over the last several months through our internal testing. In addition, we are making this transition more apparent by announcing that Studio Bot is now called Gemini in Android Studio.

Gemini in Android Studio is an AI-powered coding assistant which can be accessed directly in the IDE. It can accelerate your ability to develop high-quality Android apps faster by helping generate code for your app, providing complex code completions, answering your questions, finding relevant resources, adding code comments and more — all without ever having to leave Android Studio. It is available in 180+ countries and territories in Android Studio Jellyfish.

If you were already using Studio Bot in the canary channel, you’ll continue experiencing the same helpful and powerful features, but you’ll notice improved quality in responses compared to earlier versions.

Ask Gemini your Android development questions

Gemini in Android Studio can understand natural language, so you can ask development questions in your own words. You can enter your questions in the chat window ranging from very simple and open-ended ones to specific problems that you need help with.

Here are some examples of the types of queries it can answer:

    • How do I add camera support to my app?
    • Using Compose, I need a login screen with the following: a username field, a password field, a 'Sign In' button, a 'Forgot Password?' link. I want the password field to obscure the input.
    • What's the best way to get location on Android?
    • I have an 'orders' table with columns like 'order_id', 'customer_id', 'product_id', 'price', and 'order_date'. Can you help me write a query that calculates the average order value per customer over the last month?
Moving image demonstrating a conversation in Android Studio

Gemini in Android Studio remembers the context of the conversation, so you can also ask follow-up questions, such as “Can you give me the code for this in Kotlin?” or “Can you show me how to do it in Compose?”

Code faster with AI powered Code Completions

Gemini in Android Studio can help you be more productive by providing you with powerful AI code completions. You can receive suggestions of multi-line code completions, suggestions for how to do comments for your code, or how to add documentation to your code.

Moving image demonstrating code completion in Android Studio

Designed with privacy in mind

Gemini in Android Studio was designed with privacy in mind. Gemini is only available after you log in and enable it. You don’t need to send your code context to take advantage of most features. By default, Gemini in Android Studio’s chat responses are purely based on conversation history, and you control whether you want to share additional context for customized responses. You can update this anytime in Android Studio > Settings at a granular project level. We also have a custom way for you to opt out certain files and folders through an .aiexclude file. Much like our work on other AI projects, we stick to a set of AI Principles that hold us accountable. Learn more here.

image of share settings in Android Studio

Build a Generative AI app using the Gemini API starter template

Not only does Android Studio use Gemini to help you be more productive, it can also help you take advantage of Gemini models to create AI-powered features in your applications. Get started in minutes using the Gemini API starter template available in the canary release – channel for Android Studio – under File > New Project > Gemini API Starter. You can also use the code sample available at File > Import Sample > Google Generative AI sample.

The Gemini API is multimodal, meaning it can support image and text inputs. For example, it can support conversational chat, summarization, translation, caption generation etc. using both text and image inputs.

image of starter templates in Android Studio

Try Gemini in Android Studio

Gemini in Android Studio is still in preview, but we have added many feature improvements — and now a major model update — since we released the experience in May 2023. It is currently no-cost for developers to try out. Now is a great time to test it and let us know what you think, before we release this experience to stable.


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