Google Bard to Be Renamed to Gemini; Android App, Advanced Subscription Coming Soon: Report

Google Bard might soon get a new name, along with an Android app, as per a new report. A tipster shared a screenshot of Bard's changelog dated February 7, which makes multiple big announcements around the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. The most notable among them is the rebranding exercise of Bard to Gemini, highlighting the name of the foundation model that powers the chatbot. Additionally, the leak also mentioned the announcement of the previously confirmed paid Advanced tier and a new Android app.

Tipster Dylan Roussel posted the screenshot which mentioned several announcements by Google. Apparently, the changelog was found within Bard's web interface. On rebranding, the reported changelog stated, “We're committed to giving everyone direct access to Google AI and, as of this week, every Gemini user across our supported countries and languages has access to Google's best family of AI models. To better reflect this commitment, we've renamed Bard to Gemini.”

This corroborates with a previous report by 9to5Google which spotted that all strings in the latest Google app beta version that earlier mentioned Bard, now instead refer to Gemini. If the latest leak is to be believed, this change is not just for the mobile app but for the entire product. However, it should be noted that we were not able to verify this ourselves.

Apart from the renaming, the leaked changelog also showed the announcement for Gemini Advanced (which was previously believed to be Google Bard Advanced). The announcement highlighted that it will be a paid version of the chatbot, powered by Google's most powerful foundational model, Gemini Ultra. At launch, Ultra 1.0 will power the Advanced tier, as per the report. The changelog mentioned that the paid version will be able to do “highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions, and creative collaboration.” The Gemini Ultra-powered chatbot will also reportedly get exclusive features and expanded multimodal capabilities.

A new Android app was also announced in the changelog. It mentioned that the mobile app will be integrated with all Google apps. Users will be able to interact with it through text, voice, or images. The app is reportedly named Gemini app and it will not be available for iOS at the time. However, the announcement mentioned that iOS users can try Gemini in the Google app.

Recently, Google Bard received a big update that added an AI image generator to the chatbot. To make the generated images easily identifiable as AI-generated, Google used the DeepMind-created SynthID, which adds an invisible-to-the-eye digital watermark to images. Alongside, the tech giant also expanded Google Bard to more than 230 countries and territories, and said that it will now support more than 40 languages.