Here's An Early Peek At Gemini Live Working On Android Auto (APK Teardown)

TL;DR

Google has been working to bring its Gemini AI models to Android Auto.
That looks like it’s likely to include Gemini Live, and we’ve managed to put together an early demo.
Right now the interface feels unfinished, and Google may further tweak how drivers access Gemini Live.

It’s a sign of the times: More and more capable AI models are making their way into more and more corners of our lives. And while that’s not a shift that’s happening without controversy, it’s also one with the potential to be quite empowering. One specific place where we’ve been tracking the growing presence of AI is in our vehicles, excited at the potential they have to help with everything from navigation to keeping us entertained on the drive.

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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.

With Google and Android Auto, that means Gemini, of course. We just managed to activate an early preview of how Gemini interactions will work with Android Auto in your car, and now we’ve sorted out another preview of Google’s in-development efforts, bringing up Gemini Live on Android Auto.

For this demo, we’re using Android Auto on a phone screen, and while we figured out how to get Gemini Live working, it seems pretty clear that this isn’t how it’s supposed to function. Critically, in our testing, we had to first tap on the mic icon to “wake up” Gemini with one regular query before we could get this sort of back-and-forth Live interaction going. Once we did, though, things seemed to work pretty well, so it feels like all the critical framework is already in place, and Google’s still trying to nail down exactly the right interface for accessing Gemini Live in your car.

Just like when you’re using Gemini Live on your phone, pulling it up on Android Auto invokes some listening controls, allowing you to temporary pause your conversation, or outright end it. You may recall from our earlier demo that Android Auto doesn’t show anything like this during a standard Gemini query. Again, as the UI here appears to be a work in progress, we can’t say if this is the same look we’ll get when Gemini Live in vehicles is finally ready for prime time, but we’d expect it to still include these same controls.

We’ll also be curious to see if there are any functional changes as Google puts the finishing touches on this experience — while Gemini Live has the potential to be extremely useful to drivers, we could also see how it could become distracting, and wonder if Google might take some manner of targeted approach to its integration with Android Auto.

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