One of generative AI’s most useful (and needed) applications is enhancing voice assistants, which have remained relatively unchanged for years. For that reason, Google is making several upgrades to its voice assistant experience with the help of Gemini. 

At the company’s Made by Google event on Tuesday, Google made Gemini its default voice assistant, replacing Google Assistant with a smarter alternative that can be interrupted, is aware of your Google apps, and can even help answer questions about the contents of your screen. 

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Gemini Live is an advanced voice assistant that can have human-like, multi-turn, verbal conversations on complex topics and even give you advice. For example, when speaking to the assistant, you can interrupt it mid-sentence and it will still understand you. You can also pick from multiple voices to enhance your conversation experience.

Arguably the biggest Gemini announcement is that Google made Gemini Live available three months after announcing it at Google I/O. However, there’s a catch: only Gemini Advanced subscribers on Android phones can access it.

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As a bonus, Pixel Pro 9 users get access to the Google One AI Premium Plan, which includes access to Gemini Advanced — and, therefore, Gemini Live — at no additional cost for the first year. But for all other Android users, it’s hard to say whether Gemini Live is worth paying $20 per month for a Google One AI Premium Plan.

When announced at Google I/O, Gemini Live also had multimodal capabilities, which allowed it to use the camera to see the world around you and ingest that as context for answers. That feature, however, has not been released yet. 

Gemini Live is a direct competitor to GPT-4o’s new and improved Voice Mode, which has the same conversational and multimodal capabilities. Like Google, OpenAI has yet to make video and screen-sharing capabilities available.