The number of active users on the Google Gemini app in Southeast Asia has more than doubled in a year, driven by youths and local language users, according to the technology giant.
The region has adopted the AI app faster than any other Google app, while coming up as the most searched-for AI assistant in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, it revealed yesterday.
While the company did not share the number of Gemini users in Southeast Asia, it has said it has about 900 million monthly active users across the globe.
In the region, young, tech-savvy users are big users of the Gemini app. Those under 25 year old account for 40 per cent of the take-up in Southeast Asia.
Singapore leads the way in using Gemini the most every day, with the highest per capita adoption of the Google app globally and the highest daily engagement in Southeast Asia.
In the country, Google says four in 10 users turn to Gemini for productive tasks like explaining or debugging code.
On weekends, though, casual chats and lifestyle requests rise to nearly a third of all prompts, with personal finance and travel queries proving more popular here than anywhere else in the region.
The region’s embrace of Gemini, no doubt, is helped by the overwhelming market share of Android smartphones in the region.
With Gemini integrated tightly with the software onboard, Google gets an advantage over rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic which needs a separate download.
That said, it helps that Gemini has made local languages easy to use with its AI. Nearly 70 per cent of prompts in the region are submitted in native languages, led by Vietnam (89 per cent), Thailand (87 per cent), and Indonesia (84 per cent).
A leading AI think-tank, AI Singapore, ranks Gemini as the overall best-performing large language model (LLM) for Southeast Asian languages.
That would come in handy for the next stage of AI adoption – agents that autonomously run tasks on behalf of users.
Google yesterday said that Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent, will roll out in all local languages in Southeast Asia to its Ultra-tier subscribers this week.
Currently available in English, it promises to manage tasks and help users navigate their digital lives.
Integrated with Google’s online productivity tools like Gmail, Docs, and Slides, the Spark cloud-based agent works in the background, even when a laptop is closed or a phone is locked.
