Thinking of taking a break from ChatGPT? Google Gemini is ready to impress (www.techradar.com)

Google is pushing Gemini — now upgraded to the Gemini 2.5 models — as a full‑blown, multimodal assistant baked into Chrome, Android, Workspace and other products. Unlike plugin-dependent chatbots, Gemini offers real‑time web knowledge, native file and media understanding (drop in PDFs, Google Docs, images), and a unified prompt-to-image pipeline powered by Google's Nano Banana image model. It also supports Gemini Live voice interactions and free-tier audio uploads up to 10 minutes for transcription/analysis, and can synthesize insights across long documents (the piece cites handling a 40‑page PDF) or annotate and generate mockups from photos. Practical orchestration across Maps, messaging and Calendar is native rather than plugin-driven. For the AI/ML community this matters because Gemini emphasizes integrated multimodality and platform-level access to live data — shifting complexity from prompt engineering and third‑party plugins into the model and Google’s ecosystem. That raises technical implications for model evaluation (multimodal benchmarks, long‑context/document understanding, audio pipelines) and product design (native action execution). It’s also a competitive signal to OpenAI: ChatGPT matches many functions via premium tiers and plugins, but Gemini’s native strengths and ecosystem momentum (visits up 46% since Aug 2025) could redefine user expectations. The tradeoffs include data‑flow and privacy concerns tied to deep Google integration, so adoption will balance convenience, capabilities and trust.