Google Gemini gets 1.5 Flash model integration for free-tier users: Details

Announced at Google I/O in May, Gemini 1.5 Flash offers multimodal capabilities while being more lightweight than the Gemini 1.5 Pro model

Google has announced that it is updating the free-tier of its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot with the new Gemini 1.5 Flash model. Google in a blog post stated that users can now experience  1.5 Flash in the unpaid version of Gemini for faster and more helpful responses. The company said that the new model integration will offer improvements across-the-board and will lower the response latency.

Google Gemini 1.5 Flash

Google launched the Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model at its Google I/O developers conference in May. The company said that the new model optimises high-volume, high-frequency tasks at scale and is more cost-efficient. Although lighter than the Gemini 1.5 Pro model, the 1.5 Flash is capable of multimodal reasoning. This essentially means that the AI model is capable of processing images, videos, voice and text.

At the time of announcement, Google said that the Gemini 1.5 model has been trained by the bigger Gemini 1.5 Pro model using a process called “distillation”. This means that most essential knowledge and skills from a larger model are transferred to a smaller, more efficient model. Google said that this makes Gemini 1.5 Flash optimum for text summarisation, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and more.

Google said that the Gemini 1.5 Flash model is now available to free-tier users in the Gemini Mobile app and on the web. The model is available in over 230 countries including India and supports more than 40 languages including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu and more.