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Last year, Google introduced file upload and analysis as a paid feature for Gemini Advanced subscribers. Now, this powerful capability is beginning to roll out to free Gemini users as well, significantly expanding the utility of the free version of Gemini and bringing advanced document interaction to a wider audience.
We’re seeing this on our non-Advanced Gemini accounts this morning, and it is showing up as available on both the Android app and the web interface at gemini.google.com. Tapping the ‘plus’ menu now reveals “Files” and “Drive” alongside the existing “Camera” and “Gallery” options, offering multiple options for file selection, allowing users to browse both their local and Google Drive files with ease. Once a file is selected and uploaded, Gemini can analyze the document, answer questions about it, and generate summaries.
A wide range of file formats are supported, including plain text (.txt), code files (C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, SQL, HTML), document files (various Microsoft Word formats, PDF, RTF, and Google Docs), and spreadsheet files (various Excel formats and Google Sheets). With this array of file types, it’s likely the one you want to utilize will work just fine.
Google has yet to release updated support documentation, so the context window for free users still remains unclear. For Gemini Advanced, the limit is 1 million tokens, which equates to approximately 1,500 pages of text or 30,000 lines of code. It’s expected that free users will have a smaller context window, but the exact size remains to be seen.
The file upload feature is currently rolling out to free Gemini accounts and may not be immediately available to all users – though we’ve anecdotally seen it in non-Advanced accounts already. One other important note: this functionality is compatible with Gemini 2.0 Flash and not the older 1.5 Flash model, which will soon be phased out. Google initially introduced file upload for Gemini Advanced in May 2024 with the launch of Gemini 1.5 Pro.
VIA: 9to5 Google
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