Google has just intensified its fight against Apple in the field of artificial intelligence

• Just days after Apple launched its AI-enabled iPhone, Google made a Gemini Live announcement.

• The iPhone 16 was a big industry topic, but Google reacted quickly.

• The tech giants are in an AI arms race and are fueling market interest with rapid announcements.

Google just made Gemini Live free, less than a week after Apple announced its first iPhone with artificial intelligence.

The AI ​​arms race shows no sign of abating as tech giants unveil their innovations to the public. Although Apple lagged behind the competition with Apple Intelligence, the new AI-powered iPhone has been the talk of the industry for weeks.

But then Google seemed to respond to the iPhone 16 release last Monday and just a few days later released Gemini Live, a virtual assistant that can have conversations. It will be free but only available to English-speaking Android users through the Gemini app.

Paying users have full access to Gemini 1.5 Pro's features, but the free tier gives more users a chance to try out the technology before committing to a $20-per-month subscription.

William Kerwin, a tech analyst at Morningstar, said this timing is starting to become a pattern. Google I/O – where Gemini Live was first demoed – took place in May, a few days after OpenAI unveiled its new large-scale language model, GPT-4o.

“Google has generally planned its announcements this way recently, including around the launch of the OpenAI GPT model,” Kerwin told Business Insider.

However, he and Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, both said there was not much to read into the case.

Chatterjee said that “announcements on artificial intelligence will be quick and without much fanfare” as long as the stock market responds positively.

Apple was remarkably late to join the AI ​​discussion that has been raging in the tech community since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. Still, the app garnered a lot of interest at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June—Apple even partnered with OpenAI for a new and improved Siri.

“We can expect the technology giants to face a steady race to stay ahead as they continue to offer consumers products powered by GenAI,” said Jacob Bourne, technology analyst at BI sister company Emarketer.

It's getting harder and harder to keep up with all the new AI announcements, and the big tech companies show no signs of giving consumers a breather.

Read the original article on Business Insider