Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is testing more upgrades to Gemini Live’s floating interface before its launch.
- The upgrade now enables support for contextual cards within the floating interface.
- This will allow you to seamlessly switch between an app and Gemini Live seamlessly, thanks to a collapsible interface.
Google Gemini is destined to fully replace Google Assistant on Android phones by the end of this year. Preparing for that transition, Google is continually upgrading the chatbot’s functionality, with a special emphasis on Gemini Live, which allows real-time conversations and a freer exchange of information compared to the standard interface. In this pursuit, Google is also optimizing the Gemini Live’s interface, and today, we’re looking at another step in this direction in the form of a sleeker and less obtrusive Gemini Live UI.
In recent months, we have witnessed Google experiment with a compact Gemini Live interface that occupies only a portion of the screen. Now, we’re seeing more updates to the overlay, which is now gaining support for other apps through extensions. The standard Gemini has supported extensions for apps such as Google Calendar, Keep, Maps, and Tasks for a long time, and Google recently rolled out support within Gemini Live.
Besides these, we’ve also seen a feature where context cards from these apps show up in Gemini Live to make information easier to understand, though support for those has yet to roll out. But now, we’re seeing cards show up in a cleaner format with a condensed Gemini Live interface. This interface allows Gemini Live to provide you with any helpful information while taking up less space. In contrast, the current Gemini Live UI covers the entire screen and limits usability. Here’s what the interface looks like.
Notably, the sleeker Gemini Live interface isn’t live yet, and we were able to tweak internal settings in version 16.32.48 of the Google app to enable it.
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While the primary benefit of this new interface is to ensure that Gemini Live takes up less space, it also brings a fundamental advantage over the current method of using it.
Presently, when you tap back (or use gesture navigation) to close Gemini Live, it takes you back to the standard Gemini chatbot interface. That means you must go back once more to close Gemini fully and return to the app you were using earlier. Even then, you might end up back on your phone’s homepage. This is what the floating Gemini Live UI could abate, by allowing you to easily resize Gemini Live and return to the app in the background or interact with it intermittently, especially if you are using Gemini Live to feed information into that app.
As you can see in the images above, the upgraded floating interface for Gemini Live lets you view notes from Keep or explore a location in Maps using cards. Along with the other apps, we also see the Pixel Weather app being supported via extensions in Gemini Live.
As with other experimental features, it is difficult to comment on whether and when Google might release this to a broader audience. But Google is already testing a floating interface for the regular Gemini chatbot in beta, and we can anticipate the same for Gemini Live.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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