Gemini surpasses one billion users
In just a few years, the AI assistant has reached a milestone that took OpenAI's ChatGPT four years, and it is now used by more people monthly than the combined populations of Europe and the US.
In just a few years, the AI assistant has reached a milestone that took OpenAI's ChatGPT four years, and it is now used by more people monthly than the combined populations of Europe and the US.
Google's AI assistant Gemini has surpassed one billion monthly users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Tuesday. It is the fastest-growing product in the company's history and the fourteenth to join the nine-zero club, with the news coming as Google's AI division is in the midst of a major reorganization.
"This is our fastest-growing product ever," Pichai wrote on social media, adding that he is proud of the entire Gemini team. The one billion user figure is calculated based on Gemini's usage across Google's entire ecosystem, from Search and Gmail to Maps and YouTube.
Alongside the milestone, Google shared some interesting insights into how people use the assistant. As many as 63 percent of users interact with Gemini directly by voice, and the number of those who rely exclusively on voice commands is growing. "Voice is transforming everyday interactions," said Josh Woodward from the Gemini team.
Busy parents are 43 percent more likely to use voice for everyday tasks. To bring the assistant closer to users worldwide, Google is soon introducing more than 60 new regional dialects. Gemini also generates over 150 million images every day, showcasing its expanding use beyond simple text conversations.
The announcement comes at a sensitive time for Google's AI department. Demis Hassabis, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, recently stepped back from day-to-day management of Google DeepMind, the lab that designs the models behind Gemini. Several leading researchers have also left, including Jeff Dean, a key figure in engineering efforts who spent nearly three decades at DeepMind.
The new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, initially slated for June, has yet to be released. Meanwhile, competitors have launched several models considered more powerful, particularly in code generation, currently the most lucrative segment of the sector. Despite this technological lag, audience remains Google's main asset as it integrates AI into its ecosystem.
Competition in the AI assistant market has never been fiercer. OpenAI announced in July that it had also reached one billion users across all its interfaces led by ChatGPT, though it did not specify whether these were monthly or weekly users. The San Francisco-based company, which sparked the AI boom with the launch of the free ChatGPT app in November 2022, built that base from scratch in less than four years. In June, it filed a confidential IPO application, and every audience metric directly impacts the valuation it hopes to achieve.
However, according to data from research firm Sensor Tower, ChatGPT's market share among AI assistants fell below 50 percent in the first half of the year. Pressure is coming from multiple fronts: besides Gemini, there are China's DeepSeek and Anthropic with its Claude assistant. The battle for a billion users has turned into a battle for their daily attention.
