25 April 2025 : Google is unlocking a significant set of new features for Gemini users in India, and has released a first of its kind data on AI adoption in the country. It is a two-pronged approach to new features, which integrates artificial intelligence (AI) video generation capabilities within Gemini, as well as an AI agent being able to understand worldly context if a user enables access to the phone’s camera or shares what’s on the phone’s screen. This, Google hopes, will widen Gemini’s relevance, adding to its arsenal of tools that already include deep integration within Android phones as well as Google’s Workspace, and AI Overviews in Search.
There’s the spectrum of competition too. In just the past few weeks, there has been significant progress in terms of AI models finding new potential capabilities, though a lot of the conversation remains around exactly that — potential, and possible purpose (there is of course an attempt to talk about benchmarks, but those may not translate in the real world). OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini, xAI adding Studio to Grok, Anthropic’s Claude adding a Research envelope, and Microsoft adding Copilot Vision to the Edge web browser, some illustrations of rapid evolution with consumers in focus. The spark arguably was the release of Chinese AI DeepSeek in January. Their claim to fame was to have rewritten rules of affordable costs for creating an AI model.
“One exciting development has been the launch of the Gemini 2.5 model, that has really taken the generative AI capabilities to a whole new level,” Manish Gupta, Senior Director at Google DeepMind, points out in a conversation with HT.
The Veo 2 video generation model now finds integration within Gemini, thereby adding an ability to generate detailed and natural-looking videos with a prompt. For now, it creates an eight-second video clip at 720p resolution, delivered as an MP4 file in a 16:9 landscape format. Google insists detailed prompts are key to how good the generated videos look — whether it’s a short story, a visual concept, or a specific scene. The video generation capabilities are exclusive for Gemini Advanced subscribers — in India, this costs ₹1,950 per month.
Summary: Google introduces Veo 2 for cinematic video generation from text prompts and upgrades Gemini Live for smarter, context-aware interactions, marking a major step in enhancing AI integration.