Getting started with Gemini

Gemini is Google’s AI assistant. If you use Gmail, Docs, or an Android phone, you have probably already met it without going looking — which makes it slightly different from assistants you have to decide to open.

Where you’ll actually find it

Gemini shows up in several places, and they behave differently:

• The Gemini app and website — the standalone chat assistant, closest to what people mean by “an AI chatbot”.
• Inside Google Workspace — in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet, working with the documents and mail you already have. This is the version most work accounts get, and it has its own data rules.
• On Android and in Search — woven into the phone and search results.

The distinction matters more than it looks. The version inside your work Workspace account operates under your organisation’s controls; the consumer app you sign into personally does not. Mixing them up is the most common way work information ends up somewhere it shouldn’t.

What it’s good at

Honestly, much the same things every capable assistant is good at: drafting, summarising, explaining, restructuring, and answering questions. Where Gemini has a genuine structural advantage is proximity to your Google data — if your documents and mail live in Workspace, an assistant that can already see them saves the copy-paste step, and that convenience usually matters more day to day than a marginally better draft.

It is also strongly multimodal: images, audio and video are first-class inputs rather than bolted on, and long documents are comfortably within its context window.

What to watch

• It still makes things up. Proximity to your data does not make it factual about the wider world. Gemini gets things wrong with the same confidence as any other assistant.
• Version names change constantly. Google ships Pro, Flash and Lite tiers and revises them often. Which one you get depends on your plan, and the naming is genuinely confusing.
• Free and paid tiers differ meaningfully in limits and which models you can reach. Check the current plans rather than trusting a figure you read somewhere — including here.

The habits that make any assistant useful matter more than the choice of assistant. If you read one other thing, make it prompting basics.

A sensible first hour

Ask it something you already know the answer to, so you can judge the quality. Then give it a real task — summarise a long document, redraft an awkward email, explain a concept you half understand. Notice where it helps and where you had to correct it; that gap is the useful thing to learn, and it is different for every person’s work.

When you’re ready to use it on work material, read what Google does with your data first.