Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other.

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google’s flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

Josh Woodward, Google’s VP overseeing Gemini, has expanded on Pichai’s announcement with additional tidbits about how people use the chatbot. Apparently, an impressive 63 percent of Gemini’s active users are using voice input, and an increasing number of them are “voice-only” users. Of the people who use Gemini Live, 20 percent are sharing their camera feeds and screens with the robot to get help.

It’s no secret that students use AI models to do their work (sometimes too much). Woodward says that 38 percent of school-related requests include an attachment, so Google is working on a new batch of study tools to be released in the coming weeks to better support that.

On the image-generation front, Google is burning tokens like never before. Those billion users are turning to Google’s AI to make a staggering 150 million images every day. Woodward says that businesses love these Nano Banana images to make marketing materials, but plenty of them are probably memes and jokes being spread around the Internet. They’re all watermarked with SynthID, but that might not help us know what’s true in the future.

Reporting from Ars Technica contributed to this story.