Google Gemini review

What it is

Gemini is Google's answer to ChatGPT, and its pitch is not that the model is smarter — it is that the model sits inside the place your work already lives. If your email, documents, spreadsheets and calendar are Google-shaped, Gemini can read and act on them in a way no competitor can match without connectors and setup work.

Where it shines

The Workspace integration is the reason to pay. Ask it to find the contract attached to a thread from March, summarise the changes, and draft a reply, and it does all three without you leaving Gmail. In Sheets it writes formulas against your actual columns. In Meet it takes notes and produces action items automatically.

Multimodality is the second strength. Gemini handles long video and audio inputs better than most rivals, which makes it a good tool for turning a recorded webinar into a summary, a blog post and a set of clips. Deep Research — where the model runs many searches and returns a structured, sourced report — is one of the better implementations of that pattern and is a strong reason to keep it alongside another assistant.

Where it falls short

Consistency is the weak point. On hard multi-step reasoning it produces the right answer less reliably than its main rivals, and it is more likely to give a confidently generic response when it should push back. Google's habit of renaming tiers and shuffling which features belong to which plan makes it genuinely difficult to know what you are paying for. Availability of Workspace features also varies by region and account type, so the experience your colleague describes may not be the one you get.

Pricing in plain English

The free tier is usable. Google AI Pro at roughly $19.99 a month is the main plan and includes 2 TB of storage, which offsets most of the cost if you already pay Google for space. Ultra at $249.99 is for professionals who need the highest tiers and video generation credits.

Who should use it

Google Workspace users, Android owners, and anyone doing heavy video or audio analysis. If you live in Microsoft 365 instead, Copilot is the equivalent argument.