AI assistant Google Gemini can boost creativity, learning and productivity – and hold a conversation rather well, too! It searches the web to find the latest information and, being multimodal, can handle multiple input and output formats. This makes it a great resource for honing written work, summarising videos, generating images and more.

What we love: Gemini Live voice conversations. These naturally flowing exchanges have changed how we seek recommendations (for things such as restaurants, books or travel), brainstorm ideas and absorb information. It feels like talking directly with an expert in every field. Like any good pal, Google Gemini also remembers conversations and context; probe deeper or interrupt mid-flow and the experience remains seamless.

Quick tip: Generate detailed information on a topic in minutes by selecting Gemini Deep Research. The AI reads dozens of relevant web pages and produces a report with cited sources.

Meet the creator: Starting life as a university project by Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, Google has since become the byword for online searching. Google Gemini continues the brand’s years-long AI research, which made headlines when neural-network-powered AlphaGo bested reigning world champion Lee Sedol at the strategy game Go in 2016.