Audio Uploads, one of the top-requested Gemini features, is now here

For all its impressive multimodal capabilities – understanding text, images, and even video – the Gemini app has been missing one key: the ability to take an audio file and discern it. While you’ve always been able to talk with Gemini, you couldn’t give it an audio file to analyze and understand. But that’s finally changing as you can now upload audio files directly to the Gemini app on Android, iOS, and the web.

How it works and what it’s for

The process is simple. Just open the ‘plus’ menu in a Gemini chat, select “Files” (on mobile) or “Upload files” (on the web), and you can now choose an audio file like an MP3, M4A, or WAV.

The most obvious use case for this is transcribing audio, which is a fantastic quality-of-life improvement. But the possibilities go far beyond that. You can now upload a recording of a meeting and ask for a bulleted summary and a list of action items. You could upload a college lecture and have Gemini pull out the key concepts for a study guide. Or you could upload an interview and ask Gemini to find the most important quotes. It’s a massive productivity booster.

The limits you need to know

As with many of Gemini’s more powerful features, there are different limits for free and paid users.

• Free users: You can upload audio files up to a total of 10 minutes in length.
• Google AI Pro or Ultra subscribers: You get a massive upgrade, with the ability to upload up to 3 hours of total audio length.

This is a huge and very welcome new feature that makes Gemini a far more versatile and powerful assistant. It’s great to see Google listening to user feedback and delivering on one of their top requests.

VIA: 9to5 Google