Prime Highlights:
- Google’s AI products have an inconsistent naming policy, which makes users perplexed about what function every tool performs.
- Several identical tools were released under various names, further making it ambiguous to differentiate between Google’s AI products.
Key Facts:
- Gemini replaced Bard and incorporated tools such as Duet, but Gemini now denotes a number of overlapping services.
- Google’s I/O 2025 event brought Gemini 1.5 Pro, Deep Think, and Astra, causing branding clutter.
- Internal team silos within Google are to blame for redundant tools and inconsistent naming throughout its AI product line.
Key Background :
Google’s artificial intelligence project has grown swiftly but has produced a problem of its own: confusing names. The firm has introduced and rebranded several AI products, sometimes with duplicative features, leaving users—and even developers—scratching their heads about which tool does what.
What was initially Bard, Google’s AI chatbot, was renamed to Gemini. While Gemini was intended to consolidate AI tools into one system, it has turned out to be a generic name given to a range of tools with various functions. Case in point, Gemini Pro, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Gemini Live are all members of the set, but provide varying functionalities ranging from simple text output to interactive voice conversations in real-time. Meanwhile, Gemini is also being utilized to describe the integration of AI into Google Workspace, in place of what was formerly referred to as Duet AI.
It was further muddled at Google I/O 2025. The company launched Astra, a very advanced AI assistant developed by DeepMind, which is capable of multimodal interaction like interpreting video input and reacting to real-world stimuli in real time. Yet the relationship of Astra to Gemini remained undefined, opening the question of whether Astra is a whole new system or an even newer version of Gemini.
Other features such as Deep Think and Deep Search—released in conjunction with Gemini updates—are named after their mighty sound but come without explicit details on how they are different from past tools in Google Search or Lens. Google’s AI video and image creation software Veo and Imagen and music models Lyria are also contributing members of the cluttered, confusing ecosystem.
This name disarray seems to reflect on how Google works internally. Product teams usually work in silos, resulting in numerous launches with similar capabilities and without much coordination. Today, the company thus has the challenge of too many similarly branded tools that do similar things, a big difference from Google’s past simplicity and clarity in naming.
For consumers, this results in frustration, as it has now become overly complicated to determine which product to use for a particular need.
Read More – Trump Strengthens US UAE Partnership with Major AI and Trade Deals
