Gemini

Gemini is Google’s assistant, built on its model family of the same name. The context window is its most concrete advantage — a whole book or several hours of meeting notes fit in one go, with no chunking and stitching. Its multimodal handling is also the most complete of the major assistants: images, audio and video all work as direct input.

Integration with Google’s own products is the other reason to pick it. If your material already lives in Gmail, Drive or Docs, it can pull from there rather than making you export and paste. The free tier is also relatively generous among the international assistants.

The trade-off is consistency. Run the same prompt a few times and the variance is more noticeable than with ChatGPT or Claude, especially on tasks with strict formatting requirements. It suits “help me work through this pile of material” better than “polish this paragraph until it ships”.

Key features

• Very long context: Whole books, long reports and stacks of meeting notes go in at once, no manual splitting.
• Multimodal input: Upload images, audio or video and ask it to interpret or summarise them.
• Google app connections: Once authorised, it can read from Gmail, Drive, Docs and more to answer questions.
• Deep Research: Runs extensive web searches on a question and compiles a long, sourced report.
• Gems: Save frequently used instructions as a custom assistant you can call up again.

How to use

1. Go to gemini.google.com, or install the Gemini app on your phone.
2. Sign in with a Google account.
3. Ask directly, or upload files, images, audio or video first and then describe what you need.
4. To use content from Gmail, Drive and the like, enable the relevant app connections in settings.
5. If a result is off, regenerate a few times or spell out the format more explicitly — its output varies more than most.

Best for

• Digesting large volumes: long reports, entire books, piles of transcripts, all queried in one pass.
• Audio and video: upload a recording or clip and get the key points back.
• People who live in Google Workspace: mail and documents are available without copy-pasting.
• First-pass research: Deep Research gives a sourced overview quickly, which you then filter yourself.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

• A very large context window makes long material the least effort here.
• The broadest multimodal input, including audio and video.
• Deep Google integration and a relatively generous free tier.

Limitations

• Inconsistent output — the same prompt can give noticeably different results.
• Tends to slip on strict formatting; for polishing prose, Claude is more dependable.
• Not reachable from mainland China, and requires a Google account.