People in dozens of countries accessed Gemini with a Bard chatbot update in early December, though only in English. Google says it can provide text-based chat abilities that improve AI abilities in complex tasks like summarising documents, reasoning, planning, and writing programming code. The bigger change with multimedia abilities -- for example, understanding hand gestures in a video or figuring out the result of a child's dot-to-dot drawing puzzle -- will arrive "soon," Google said.

Google has brought Gemini to programmers to incorporate the technology into their software. That's through the basic Google AI Studio web interface or the more sophisticated Vertex AI. And for usage beyond a free low rate, Google cut prices by a factor of two to four. That could help encourage developers who are enamoured of OpenAI's programming interface to at least kick the tires on Gemini.

Google said it will also have an AI assistant called Pixie, exclusive to its Pixel devices. The rollout of Pixie, an AI assistant exclusively for Pixel devices, could boost Google's hardware business when tech companies are racing to integrate their hardware with new AI capabilities.

Pixie will use the information on a customer's phone -- including data from Google products like Maps and Gmail -- to evolve into a far more personalised version of Google Assistant, according to one of the people with knowledge of the project. One source said the feature could launch next year with the Pixel 9 and the 9 Pro.