one year on
Google retires Bard, launches Gemini and Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0 at about $20/month
The Bard brand is gone; Google replaces it with Gemini across web, Android, and iOS, and introduces a paid tier called Gemini Advanced powered by the Ultra 1.0 model as part of a new Google One AI Premium plan.
Exactly one year after rushing out Bard to compete with ChatGPT, Google is killing the brand. The chatbot now lives under the name of its underlying model family: Gemini. Starting today, users on the web will see Gemini; a new Gemini app is rolling out on Android, and the Google app on iOS will also carry the new name. Free users retain access to the Gemini Pro model, but the headline addition is Gemini Advanced — a $20-per-month tier that unlocks Ultra 1.0, the largest model Google has released and the first to claim to outperform human experts on the MMLU benchmark.
The paid plan, labeled Google One AI Premium, bundles 2TB of cloud storage and integrates Gemini into Workspace apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet — effectively replacing the Duet AI brand as well. Subscribers get a two-month free trial, and the tier is launching in over 150 countries, initially only in English with Japanese and Korean promised next. On Android, users can optionally replace Google Assistant with Gemini for hands-free queries.
CEO Sundar Pichai framed the move as the next chapter of the Gemini era, emphasizing that the model family now supports an ecosystem spanning consumer products, APIs, and enterprise cloud services. Developers already building with Gemini models number in the hundreds of thousands, Google says, and more details for that audience are expected next week. The company adds that it is already training ‘the next iteration’ of Gemini models.
TechCrunch notes that $20 per month is the going price for advanced AI chat tools, including ChatGPT. The AI Premium plan is available starting today.
The record
TechCrunch reports that the Bard rebrand was almost a necessity after early users experienced middling results, and notes the awkwardness of the naming cycle: 'If Google ever decides to launch a more capable model and wants to call it Aries instead of Gemini Ultra Super Pro Max 3.0, who knows what it’ll call Bard then.'
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The Gemini branding stuck, but the $19.99 tier failed to meaningfully dent ChatGPT's subscriber base. By mid-2026, Google had consolidated most consumer AI into 'Gemini' across products, though Bard's troubled launch continued to be cited as a cautionary tale in postmortems of the company's AI strategy.