Google announces major Gemini AI upgrades & new dev tools
Google has unveiled a range of updates to its developer products, aimed at improving the process of building artificial intelligence applications.
Mat Velloso, Vice President, AI / ML Developer at Google, stated, "We believe developers are the architects of the future. That's why Google I/O is our most anticipated event of the year, and a perfect moment to bring developers together and share our efforts for all the amazing builders out there. In that spirit, we updated Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview with even better coding capabilities a few weeks ago. Today, we're unveiling a new wave of announcements across our developer products, designed to make building transformative AI applications even better."
The company introduced an enhanced version of its Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview, described as delivering improved performance on coding and complex reasoning tasks while optimising for speed and efficiency. This model now includes "thought summaries" to increase transparency in its decision-making process, and its forthcoming "thinking budgets" feature is intended to help developers manage costs and exercise more control over model outputs. Both Gemini 2.5 Flash versions and 2.5 Pro are available in preview within Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, with general availability for Flash expected in early June, followed by Pro.
Among the new models announced is Gemma 3n, designed to function efficiently on personal devices such as phones, laptops, and tablets. Gemma 3n can process audio, text, image, and video inputs and is available for preview on Google AI Studio and Google AI Edge. Also introduced is Gemini Diffusion, a text model that reportedly generates outputs at five times the speed of Google's previous fastest model while maintaining coding performance. Access to Gemini Diffusion is currently by waitlist.
The Lyria RealTime model was also detailed. This experimental interactive music generation tool allows users to create, control, and perform music in real time. Lyria RealTime can be accessed via the Gemini API and trialled through a starter application in Google AI Studio.
Several additional variants of the Gemma model family were announced, targeting specific use cases. MedGemma is described as the company's most capable multimodal medical model to date, intended to support developers creating healthcare applications such as medical image analysis. MedGemma is available now via the Health AI Developer Foundations programme. Another upcoming model, SignGemma, is designed to translate sign languages into spoken language text, currently optimised for American Sign Language to English. Google is soliciting feedback from the community to guide further development of SignGemma.
Google outlined new features intended to facilitate the development of AI applications. A new, more agentic version of Colab will enable users to instruct the tool in plain language, with Colab subsequently taking actions such as fixing errors and transforming code automatically. Meanwhile, Gemini Code Assist, Google's free AI-coding assistant, and its associated code review agent for GitHub, are now generally available to all developers. These tools are now powered by Gemini 2.5 and will soon offer a two million token context window for standard and enterprise users on Vertex AI.
Firebase Studio was presented as a new cloud-based workspace supporting rapid development of AI applications. Notably, Firebase Studio now integrates with Figma via a plugin, supporting the transition from design to app. It can also automatically detect and provision necessary back-end resources. Jules, another tool now generally available, is an asynchronous coding agent that can manage bug backlogs, handle multiple tasks, and develop new features, working directly with GitHub repositories and creating pull requests for project integration.
A new offering called Stitch was also announced, designed to generate frontend code and user interface designs from natural language descriptions or image prompts, supporting iterative and conversational design adjustments with easy export to web or design platforms.
For those developing with the Gemini API, updates to Google AI Studio were showcased, including native integration with Gemini 2.5 Pro and optimised use with the GenAI SDK for instant generation of web applications from input prompts spanning text, images, or videos. Developers will find new models for generative media alongside enhanced code editor support for prototyping.
Additional technical features include proactive video and audio capabilities, affective dialogue responses, and advanced text-to-speech functions that enable control over voice style, accent, and pacing. The model updates also introduce asynchronous function calling to enable non-blocking operations and a Computer Use API that will allow applications to browse the web or utilise other software tools under user direction, initially available to trusted testers.
The company is also rolling out URL context, an experimental tool for retrieving and analysing contextual information from web pages, and announcing support for the Model Context Protocol in the Gemini API and SDK, aiming to facilitate the use of a broader range of open-source developer tools.
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