Gemini glows with new floating overlay panel, starts rolling out

Following Live earlier this week, Gemini is also starting to roll out the floating overlay panel on Android, with a glow being the telltale sign you have it.

Upon triggering Gemini, you’ll notice a new glow animation around the panel. Besides looking nice (and being vaguely similar to the new Google Assistant design from 2019), this indicates that you have Gemini’s new contextual overlay. 

First announced at I/O 2024 in May, Gemini responses will appear in that panel (which can expand) instead of opening a fullscreen UI. Besides preserving the context of what you’re doing and being less disruptive, this pairs with Gemini’s image generation. You can drag anything you’ve generated into apps like Gmail or Google Messages. 

You can tap the top-right corner to open the fullscreen interface.

With this rollout, you also get an “Ask about this video” chip — in place of “Ask about this screen” — when activating Gemini on a YouTube video. You can have Gemini summarize or ask follow-up questions.

Gemini’s floating overlay with this new glow is not yet widely rolled out. Compared to Gemini Live, availability is much more limited. We’re seeing it on a Pixel 8 Pro of ours and have received other reports about its availability.

On Tuesday, Google said it would be available in the coming weeks on Android for both Gemini users and Gemini Advanced subscribers.  

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