Google Matches ChatGPT With New Chatbot Subscription
Google is jumping into the tech industry's latest craze: subscription chatbots.
The search giant will begin charging $19.99 a month for its most powerful chatbot, Gemini Advanced, as part of a subscription plan that also grants access to extra file storage and other perks.
Gemini Advanced is the latest update to the chatbot Google released a few months after the sudden rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT caught the company flat-footed, despite its reputation as a pioneer in artificial-intelligence research. Microsoft, the largest backer of OpenAI, last month released a subscription chatbot catering to individual users of its work software.
The new Gemini Advanced offering is Google's attempt to directly profit from growing consumer interest in AI services that can generate novel text and images. A free version of the chatbot using less sophisticated AI technology will remain available.
Gemini Advanced will be a "new experience far more capable at reasoning, following instructions, coding and creative collaboration," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement on Thursday. "For example, it can be a personal tutor, tailored to your learning style. Or it can be a creative partner, helping you plan a content strategy or build a business plan."
Alphabet, Google's parent company, makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising but has tried to diversify into areas such as cloud storage and online cable packages as growth in its core business has slowed.
Pichai said last month the company's annual subscription revenue reached $15 billion, an increase of five times in the same number of years. Google brought in $307 billion of revenue last year, mostly from ads placed next to search results.
Tech giants are still figuring out how to turn recent advances in AI into steady profits. Generative AI, the technology behind chatbots, is particularly costly to develop and deliver to large volumes of users.
The price tag for Google's chatbot will match similar offerings from Microsoft and OpenAI. Several smaller startups such as Character and Perplexity also charge subscription fees for their most powerful chatbot products.
Elon Musk's X introduced a $16 a month premium subscription in December that includes access to Grok, a chatbot billed as more snarky and uninhibited than competing services.
Google renamed its chatbot and several AI business software features to Gemini as part of the announcement on Thursday, mirroring the branding it introduced in December for its most advanced AI technology.
Google's chatbot, initially called Bard, struggled to catch up to ChatGPT's popularity, attracting about one-fifth of the OpenAI product's 1.6 billion visits in the month of January, according to Similarweb data. OpenAI hasn't said how many people pay for the subscription version.
The Gemini chatbot will become available as a stand-alone app for phones running the widely used Android mobile software and within the Google app on iPhones, Google said.
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