Google just stepped up its AI fight with Apple

Gemini Live is now free for English-language Androids, days after Apple’s iPhone announcement.

Google just made Gemini Live free less than a week after Apple announced its first artificial intelligence iPhone.

The AI arms race isn’t slowing down as tech giants rush to introduce their innovations to the public. Although Apple lagged behind competitors with Apple Intelligence, the new AI-forward iPhone has been the talk of the industry for weeks.

But then, Google seemed to answer last Monday’s iPhone 16 drop with the roll-out of Gemini Live, the virtual assistant capable of carrying a conversation, merely days later. It will be free, though limited to only English-language Android users on the Gemini app.

Paying users will have full access to the capabilities of Gemini 1.5 Pro, but the free tier gives more users a chance to try out the technology before subscribing for $20 a month.

William Kerwin, tech analyst at Morningstar, said its timing is becoming a pattern. Google I/O — where Gemini Live was first demoed — was held in May, days after OpenAI introduced its new large language model GPT-4o.

“Google has generally timed their announcements lately this way, including around OpenAI GPT model launches,” Kerwin told B-17.

However, he and Forrester vice president and principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee both said there’s not much to read into in this case.

Chatterjee said that “AI announcements will be rapid fire and dime a dozen” as long as the stock market responds well to them.

Apple was notably late to join in the AI conversation buzzing around the tech community since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. Still, it got a lot of interest at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June — it even inked a partnership with OpenAI for a new and improved Siri.

“We can expect to see a steady cadence of one-upmanship among tech giants as they continue releasing GenAI-enhanced products to consumers,” Jacob Bourne, tech analyst at B-17 sister company Emarketer, said.

It’s getting hard to keep up with all the new AI announcements out there, and Big Tech shows no signs of letting consumers catch their breath.