Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google’s experimental AI Mode is working on Live support, just like in the Gemini app.
- When ready AI Mode Live should support camera and screen input.
- You’ll have your pick of four AI voices for Live interactions.
When Google comes up with something it likes, you had better believe that you’re going to start seeing it everywhere. That’s absolutely true not just for Gemini itself, but also for many of the ways Google has enhanced it AI systems through new functionality and means to access them. Right now, Google’s making a big push for Search AI Mode, expanding access to its tests and even starting to introduce it to some non-testers. Now we’re getting an early look at what could be Google’s next big upgrade to come through here.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Gemini Live is one of the easiest to appreciate features we’ve seen Google bring to its AI agent, letting us naturally interact with it through smoothly flowing conversation. Google’s already been implementing some nice feature upgrades for Live, like its multi-language skills, and today we’re taking a peek at another home for it, as Google works to bring Live to AI Mode.
We’re looking at version 16.17.38.sa.arm64 beta of the Google app, and while none of this is publicly accessible just yet, we managed to convince the software to offer this early preview of Google’s efforts towards Live for AI Mode.
Here you can see it implemented as that familiar Live icon off to the side of the AI Mode input box, which you can tap to transition over to Live’s back-and-forth spoken interactions.
Remember those new AI Mode voices we dug up earlier this year? They’re back here, now with some actual human-sounding names replacing the codenames we had before.
We’ve also managed to surface a couple additional ways to interact with Live for AI Mode, though right now these are a bit rougher to access than the other parts. By the time Live for AI Mode is ready to go, well, live, we may also have these two options for Gemini-like camera and screen sharing.
Like we said, Google bringing Live to AI Mode is just the most natural thing in the world, given how we’ve seen the company’s AI efforts rolling out thus far. Considering that AI Mode itself is still technically experimental at the moment, it’s hard to say when this feature expansion might be ready to at least hit the public phase of testing. In our evaluation we already found it to be decently functional, so it feels like it should just be a matter of time before we see Google formally announcing this addition.
