Google did it: Bard is now Gemini

About a year ago, Google introduced us to Google Bard. This was the company’s generative AI chatbot and an answer to ChatGPT. Well, Bard is dead; the company officially renamed it to Gemini today.

This is something that we wondered about once the company released it late last year. We are all wondering why Google had two powerful generative AI products existing simultaneously. Well, today Google announced that Bard is being retired, and Gemini will be the flagship generative AI product for the company.

Bard was renamed to Gemini, so what does this mean?

It doesn’t mean much for the common user. If you’ve been using Bard for your AI needs, it will simply be called Gemini now. It’s all still powered by the Gemini Pro model, so you won’t see a difference in functionality or capability. You will still use the platform just like regular. The only thing that’ll be different is the name.

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, Gemini now has its own app on the Play Store. You can download it for free now.

Download Gemini

If you are a paying customer, then there will be a few things to note. Firstly, if you use Duet AI, this service is also getting a name change. It’ll be called Gemini for Workspace. You won’t see a change in functionality, however.

If you are a Google Cloud customer, Duet AI will also become Gemini. However, this change will happen within the next couple of weeks.

If you are a Google One user, and you want to gain access to Gemini Ultra, then you will want to sign up for the Google One AI Premium plan. This plan costs $19.99/month, and it will give you access to Gemini Ultra along with 2TB of storage and more. Check out the official page for more information.

If you don’t know what Gemini Ultra is, this is the most powerful model that Google currently has. It has multimodal capabilities and extremely great reasoning capabilities.

That’s about it

Other than that, there’s not much more to say about this new transition. We saw this coming when Google announced Gemini. Bard was very much just an answer to ChatGPT. It was just a product basically slapped together so that Google didn’t lose search revenue.

So, with several months of planning behind it, the company was able to thoroughly construct an AI strategy, and that strategy involves a three-tier generative AI model. 2024 will be the year of Google AI, and things are definitely going to change… either for better or worse. If you want to know more about Gemini, check out our Gemini explainer.