Google is rebranding its Bard AI service as Gemini. Here's what it means.

Google is introducing a free artificial intelligence app called Gemini that will enable people to rely on technology instead of their own brains to write, interpret what they're reading and perform a number of other tasks in their lives.

The advent of Gemini, named after an AI project unveiled late last year, means that Google is retiring the Bard brand that it introduced a year ago. Bard, a chatbot, was an effort to compete with ChatGPT, the rival app unleashed by the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI in late 2022, but Google on Thursday said that Bard would know be known as Gemini, which it said "represents our most capable family of models."

Google is immediately releasing a standalone Gemini app for smartphones running on its Android software, as well as on the web.