Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Gemini Live lets you share you screen to get answers about what you’re looking at.
- Right now, initiating screen sharing is awkward from within active Gemini Live conversations.
- That could soon change with a new button in Gemini Live’s call-like notification interface.
Like so many other things in life, when it comes to AI, you only get out of it what you put in. Now granted, in the case of AI that can be an incredibly complicated situation, involving mountains of training data that us end users aren’t privy to. But we can control what information we feed into AI when giving it a task, and when it comes to using Gemini on our phones, one of the most powerful ways to do just that is sharing what we see on our screens. Gemini Live just started rolling out screen sharing support widely, and we’ve got an early look at what could be one of the next big improvements to how it works.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Looking into the new 16.15.38.sa.arm64 beta build of the Google app for Android, we’ve spotted some early work on a change to how you share your screen with Gemini. Currently, if you’ve stated a conversation with Gemini Live, and then decide that sharing what’s on your screen would be a useful addition, the way you initiate sharing is a little bit less than graceful. If you’re already browsing another app, you have to go back over to Gemini to start sharing. Or you can pull up the Gemini overlay and begin sharing that way, but in either case you’re effectively starting a new conversation.
That’s not great, especially as it threatens to lose relevant context from what you were just doing with Gemini. The good news is that Google appears to be well on its way to addressing this oversight.
Google has been preparing an addition to its call-style notification for controlling Gemini Live, consisting of a new “Screen” button. Critically, this method of starting a screen share would not interrupt the current Gemini Live conversation. That’s even true when you go to end screen sharing; you’ll be able to revoke access to your screen but continue your audio conversation with Gemini Live.
It’s not a huge-huge deal, as you could always take a moment to re-establish necessary context, and just deal with having some extra entries in your Gemini history for all the split-up Live chats, but this is exactly the sort of improvement we’re expecting to see more of this year as next-gen AI tools stop feeling like advanced proofs of concept, and take the time to focus on usability.
