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Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing capabilities

2025-04-0716:5319399blog.google

Gemini Live with video and screen sharing is now rolling out to Android mobile devices.

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5 ways to use Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing

Apr 07, 2025

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[[read-time]] min read

Gemini Live with camera and screen sharing capabilities is now available on Android. Here’s how to get started.

Isha Sheth

Sr. Product Manager, Gemini app

With Gemini Live, a tool so grand, You can converse with AI, hand in hand. Through camera lens or screen, you share your view,

And Gemini will help, it's true.

From cluttered rooms to creative blocks, It offers guidance, in helpful talks. For shopping, skills, or just a chat,

Gemini Live, a friend you'll have at that.

Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.

Gemini Live

In March, we began rolling out the ability to talk live with Gemini about anything you see, whether it’s through your phone’s screen or through its camera. This soon will be available to all Gemini Advanced subscribers on Android devices, and today we’re bringing it to more people, starting with all Gemini app users on Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 devices. 1

Gemini Live 2 lets you have natural, free-flowing conversations with Gemini in over 45 different languages. Want to give it a try? Check out these five ways people have told us that using their camera or sharing their screen with Gemini Live has made life easier.

Feeling overwhelmed by spring cleaning? Start by aiming your camera at a messy drawer, a cluttered closet or an overflowing shelf. Ask Gemini for suggestions on how to categorize items, maximize space or even identify what you can donate or discard. Get real-time advice and visual guidance as you declutter, letting Gemini be your organization partner.

If you’re stuck in a creative rut, brainstorm out loud with Gemini. Show your photos to Gemini by sharing your screen: you could share images of something that inspires you, like the textures of a tree or the colors of a bustling market, and ask Gemini to spark ideas for designs, creative writing or even crafts.

3. Troubleshoot and get input

Have a squeaky chair? A glitching record player? With Gemini Live’s camera input, you can show Gemini what you’re seeing in real time and get quick input while you work. Just point your camera at the issue and chat with Gemini to figure out a plan.

Tired of endless tabs and indecisive online shopping? Share your screen in Gemini Live as you browse online retailers, and Gemini can be your personal shopping assistant. Ask for comparisons between products or for style advice on outfits. You can even show Gemini specific items and ask what would compliment them using your camera to show your own wardrobe. Get instant feedback on your choices, ensuring you make informed (and stylish) purchases.

Share your screen with Gemini and get valuable feedback on your work, whether it's your latest blog post, social media campaign or collection of photos. Get advice on everything from profile pictures and captions to overall layout and design. Gemini can analyze your content, identify areas for improvement and provide personalized recommendations to help you make a lasting impression.

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Comments

  • By simonw 2025-04-114:271 reply

    I've been using this to help me read papers with mathematical notation in them. I screen share with https://aistudio.google.com/live and then ask (out loud) questions like "what do these symbols mean?" - it's a huge help for me, since I never memorized all of that stuff.

    • By rockmeamedee 2025-04-1110:02

      Oh this is great! I always have this problem. I find that's one of my biggest barriers when reading queueing theory content. I'm only doing it intermittently so I don't have memorized the meanings of ρ,σ,μ,λ...

      Visually I also often confuse rho and sigma, and math texts will use psi ψ and phi φ in weird fonts and I can never tell them apart.

  • By kleiba 2025-04-1112:461 reply

    Cool tech, but for some reason, the very first sentence in every reply the AI gives in the demo videos is really off-putting to me personally. It seems to me like perhaps this kind of joyful helpfulness introductory sentence is expected in US culture, but it immediately turned me off. I come from a culture that is less verbose in general and more to the point, so this feels like a mismatch right away.

    • By 1024core 2025-04-1115:201 reply

      [flagged]

      • By d-lisp 2025-04-1116:05

        That is not what is implied here, OP seems to dislike the speech aesthetics produced by the model. I feel the same; the sugar-coating provided before and after any actual valuable information is (to me) : - not succeeding in awkwardly trying to achieve an experience that would be comparable to talking with a human person - not efficient, not enjoyable - perfectly matching the experience of talking with an highly standardized and gimmicky version of human_v0.01.

        Now, that being said, I don't really care about all of this.

        The USA population is equivalent to approximately 4% of the total world population.

  • By yalogin 2025-04-116:3310 reply

    I am getting extremely skeptical of AI “age”. I was hoping it will unlock a whole new generation of startups like the iPhone did. However genAI is too generic and too blunt a tool, as in it does everything. However it’s too expensive for a small company to do stuff with. Looks like these AI companies (google and OpenAI) realize that and so are even doing the vertical integration themselves. In such an event does genAI end up being the automation tool that you access/use through OpenAI or google and that’s it?

    I am sure people here see it better than I do, so what new class of problems is this genAI going to solve?

    • By monkeydust 2025-04-119:583 reply

      I do some angel investing so get a lot of deal flow in my inbox. A lot of the AI ones (which is now 99% of everything) are not really businesses.

      They are at best nice features or capabilities to have in wider enterprise application suite for say HR or Accountancy but on their own its just a lot of smart people working extremely hard to sell one tiny solution that is small cogwheel for a much larger problem.

      My gut is telling me that very soon, if not now, there will be an opportunity for savvy VCs to sweep up some of these cogwheels and package them together into a real business and it's something I am exploring with a few other angels. Curious what others think on this. Feel free to DM me (details on profile).

      • By spacebanana7 2025-04-1111:59

        Won't the general purpose models eventually eat all the application layer business models?

        Now that ChatGPT desktop can read files in my code editor and apply changes I've pretty much stopped using dev specific AI tools. Same with spreadsheet problems - where uploading data to ChatGPT and hoping for the best actually works pretty well now.

      • By fxtentacle 2025-04-1117:25

        I fully agree with this.

        I was involved very early with automated speech recognition for transcribing meetings, but then both UberConference and Google Meet just integrated it into their existing offerings, thereby massively reducing the market size for standalone solutions. And given how heavily subsidized AI API calls are at the moment, just relying on them is a huge risk for your business model, because you never know when your suppliers' prices will 10x to represent the true cost of providing those AI services.

        In my opinion, the sales of many of these new AI tools are mostly driven by the existing audience of the creator. In many cases, you could just ask an LLM to quickly build you your own competing solution, which you can then use for free. E.g. all those SEO content and LinkedIn blog post bots. Vibe-coded AI "businesses" are the software equivalent of branded white t-shirts.

      • By yalogin 2025-04-121:17

        This is exactly how I see it and hence my original comment. I am working on solving an actual problem with genAI. However I thought nothing is preventing the Oats from usurping this solution. My suspicion is confirmed once I started seeing vertical integrations by these companies. In fact I am now convinced that genAI as a service doesn’t have a long life outside of a search engine replacement and so these companies started doing vertical integration. However the once they start it they just came at every vertical as the unferlying tool is truly generic.

    • By TeMPOraL 2025-04-118:42

      I personally don't want to see "a whole new generation of startups". GenAI, LLMs in particular, are a powerful tool for the users precisely because they are general.

      After all, what is the business of such startups of the "AI age"? It's using the AI models on the backend, where users can't reach, to sprinkle some magic onto features. But as a user, I don't want your product to use AI as a tool, I want your product to be a tool the AI uses. The former keeps power away from users, the latter gives it back to them.

    • By n_ary 2025-04-118:391 reply

      Here is a different take. The GenAI is just another revenue stream for big players with scale or resources.

      At work, I was tasked with building some magical agentic stuff, working on it for a while, I realized that, HN shouts, oAI/xAI/Google/Amazon/Anthropic have no moats, there are oss models available. The actual fact is, the moat is the access to scale of resources(GPUs, power infra, network), which is very difficult to build for random joe's startup.

      You must always rent a model access from one of these players(even OpenRouter delegates), and that is the exact moat.

      GenAI solves problems of having more generalized solutions, so instead of a super customized secret sauce solutions for your product as competitive edge, you now build magic prompts for GenAI to take the same input and hopefully with enough GenAI ingesting the same data and coming to consensus, you get a reasonably useful output that previously your custom solution was capable of. Since you no longer have a custom solution, you now pay off the GenAI operators(the real moat of GenAI for all operators hosting it). In the process,you also sacrifice your competitive edge of that super secret IP and relying heavily on GenAI prompting correctly and numerous verification in each step with enough automation, which of course again costs money.

      GenAI is the new hammer of visionary leadership and executives (a hefty amount of money has been burned to campaign and PR to convince these people) to use it everywhere, so the operators can ensure that they make some profit from the amount of money they sank on it. If you super impose the "AI" of current year to "Apps" in 201x era, where everything must have an "app", you'll suddenly realize that we've seen the same before and of course most apps need cloud... and as clouds have costs, apps became more subscription model instead of previous 200x era buy once, use forever.

      • By samvher 2025-04-1115:40

        If the only moat really will be the scale of computation resources, that's great news for users, because it will be an extremely competitive market where prices will be driven down very effectively.

        I suspect that model quality/vibes and integrations will play a role as well though.

    • By BeetleB 2025-04-1117:53

      > However genAI is too generic and too blunt a tool, as in it does everything.

      How does this preclude the AI "age"? And why is the metric "companies make money off of it"?

      I view it more like open source/Linux. When Linux was new, it was immensely useful , but not a means for companies to make money (except for a tiny few).

      Or more precisely, far more people used Linux for their own personal benefit than companies making money off of it.

      And so it is with generative AI. For me, personally, it's very useful.[1] So assuming the major companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) don't go bankrupt and/or kill it off, gen AI is here to stay, and will continue to disrupt. That startups can't make much money off of it is somewhat irrelevant.

      [1] It has revolutionized speech recognition for me. I have several automations running that were coded by Claude. Things that had been in my mind for years but I didn't have time to write them. MCP will add more value to my life soon. Etc.

    • By fhd2 2025-04-117:462 reply

      Well, what's a tool? I would say:

      1. It solves a problem. Doesn't have to be a completely unsolved problem, can just be a new solution. Or even just new packaging on an old solution. But it needs to solve some kind of problem.

      2. It's trustworthy. Some people get a tool to suite their own process. But the majority, from anecdotal evidence, will adopt the tool's process. There's this idea that "these guys know how to do invoicing so I don't have to think about invoicing if I use their invoicing tool".

      3. It's known. A bit philosophical, but if something exists that nobody _knows_ solves a problem they might not even know they have, how much of a useful tool is it, really?

      DropBox is an interesting example. It wasn't exactly a major scientific breakthrough, and a lot of people asked "why don't people just use FTP?". If you focus on (1), DropBox looked close to pointless. But what they did is nail (2) and (3).

      Now, if you subscribe to the hype, you might argue (1) and (2) will soon be covered. AI will magically solve your problem and be a universal domain expert telling you what to do, so you don't have to think about it. You might also argue that it will magically solve (3), with stuff like Gemini Live kinda watching you all day and constantly going "let me tell you how to do that" or "let me do that for you".

      Seems unlikely to me. Not impossible, most things I can think of are theoretically possible. Just unlikely. And if you think even just _one_ of those three aspects can't be fully automated in the near future, there's still plenty of opportunity left to differentiate in that area.

      I think generative AI does unlock a new generation of startups, because it's genuinely new technologies that we can find at least some valuable use cases for. And an army of startups tends to be better at quickly exploring a new solution space than a few big incumbents. So in that sense, it is similar to smartphones, which also brought a new solution space, and with it, startups.

      • By inferiorhuman 2025-04-118:031 reply 

          It's trustworthy.
        In what way is AI trustworthy? It's ruining the parts of the internet I use and care about. I can't visit Digikey's site in an incognito tab without having to sit through a ~5 second captcha these days. Mouser is less aggressive, but it's still problematic. Drew's spent how much time combating AI bots instead of improving Sourcehut?

        In fact I'd be hard pressed to think of a site that isn't getting boned by AI.

        • By fhd2 2025-04-1110:50

          Well, I meant it in the sense of: You use a tool because you think it's creators really know this space and you can rely on it. To stick to the DropBox example, their users probably trust them to keep file management convenient for them and to keep their files safe.

          I've seen a depressing amount of people treat LLMs like some sort of oracle. So I can picture a significant number of consumers just trusting ChatGPT with their taxes or whatever, based on the assumption that it know any domain at least as good as human experts.

          I'm not saying _I_ find any LLM trustworthy. But if enough people do, it becomes difficult to differentiate there.

      • By bryanrasmussen 2025-04-118:021 reply

        the problem for me with AI startup, built on someone else's AI, is that it is difficult for me to envision what the moat will be - perhaps because it is difficult to think up what the moat will be for something so generically specified, but really whenever I think of something cool, it seems AI is an added on ability but not the main driver, and that AI does not give any moat whatsoever.

        • By fhd2 2025-04-1110:43

          I agree, it's an implementation detail. What you sell is a solution, and your mode is generally your brand, your existing user base, and any anti competitive shenanigans you manage to get away with. Not so much even the actual quality of the product, it's more important what people _think_ it's quality is.

    • By motoxpro 2025-04-118:39

      I have no idea if this will be as big as an iPhone, but the early iPhone apps and development followed a similar trajectory. Viral flashlight apps and others that then got integrated into the OS, similar to API wrappers and viral photo makers of today getting swallowed up by the next model update.

      In terms of what problems it solves, I would imagine that will be up to the developers/companies to come up with the Uber/Airbnb/Tiktok, that the iPhone enabled, that AI enables. Same as any platform.

    • By Art9681 2025-04-123:06

      "I am getting extremely skeptical of Python. What class of problems is this language going to solve?"

      "I am getting extremely skeptical of Photoshop. What class of problems is this software going to solve?"

      "I am getting extremely skeptical of the internet. What class of problems is this network going to solve?"

    • By ijidak 2025-04-1113:42

      It's too early to tell. We're only 24-36 months in.

      We're still in the post Netscape, pre-dotcom-crash bubble.

      Real applications are coming.

    • By dmos62 2025-04-116:411 reply

      It's not too expensive. I did some crawling the other day. AI wrote the crawler automatically, then I had it extract structured info from the crawled product info. It was about 600 requests to o4-mini. Cost me about 2.5 cents.

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