Google on Thursday renamed its Bard chatbot after the new artificial intelligence that is powering it, called Gemini, and said consumers can pay for better reasoning capabilities as it vies with Microsoft to win subscriptions.
U.S. customers can subscribe for $19.99 a month to access Gemini Advanced, which includes a more powerful Ultra 1.0 AI model, the Alphabet subsidiary said.
Subscribers will receive two terabytes of cloud storage that typically cost $9.99 monthly, and they will soon gain access to Gemini in Gmail and Google’s productivity suite.
This bundle, known as the Google One AI Premium plan, represents one of the company’s biggest answers yet to Microsoft and its partner OpenAI. It also shows growing competition over consumers, who now have several paid AI subscription options.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus a year ago pioneered the market for buying early access to AI models and other features, while Microsoft recently announced a competing subscription for AI in programs such as Word and Excel. Both subscriptions cost $20 a month in the United States.
In an interview, Product Lead Jack Krawczyk said cloud storage, Gmail and other integrations would put Google’s subscription in harmony with how people work.
