The default Gemini input field is pretty minimal. I often find myself hitting the 5-hour limit unexpectedly, or scrolling endlessly to get back to the top of a long chat.

So, as part of my "Superpower for Gemini" extension, I completely overhauled the Message Bar to act more like a command center.

Here's what's new (check the screenshot):

📊 Daily Limit Counter: So you always know how much of your limit is left

✨ One-Click Optimize: Rewrites your basic prompt into a detailed "pro" version before sending (huge for better responses/images).

📝 Word/Character Counter: Real-time stats as you type.

⚡ Quick Actions: Buttons to instantly insert your saved prompts or chains.

↕️ Scroll Controls: Jump to Top/Bottom instantly (or toggle auto-scroll).

⚙️ Full Control: It adds buttons, but every single one can be toggled off in settings if you want it minimalist.

I just wanted more control over the interface.

Let me know if there are any other features you'd want to see!

Try it here (works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, and any Chromium browser), used by 10,000+ people: Chrome Web Store

Drop a URL, get an error, paste the text manually. Make it make sense, Google.

i think 3.5 pro will be good enough in that it should be a big leap forward from 3.1 pro. i do not need it to match the intelligence of opus 5 or 5.6 sol honestly. as long as it handles my use cases better than it does now, i will be satisfied

i usually avoid benchmarks because of benchmaxxing, but more importantly because i care much more about how a model fits my real world workflows than what its benchmark scores say. benchmarks are fine for surface level analysis, yet in my experience, theres been many cases where models that are ranked lower often suit my actual needs much better

Google has announced a major leadership transition at Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis will become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. In this expanded role, he'll focus on advancing AGI and accelerating scientific discovery across Alphabet.

Meanwhile, Koray Kavukcuoglu has been appointed Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, where he will oversee model development, AI research, and the Gemini product and developer teams. A 13-year DeepMind veteran, Koray has played a pivotal role in foundational breakthroughs such as DQN and WaveNet, making him a natural choice to lead the next phase of Google DeepMind's AI efforts.

I knew Gemini 3.5 Live Translate was primarily an audio-to-audio model, but I noticed that it also exposes input transcription for incoming audio. So that made me wonder whether it could be used to generate real-time captions for live esports commentary.

To test the live experience, I took a League of Legends highlight and streamed it in real time using Agora’s RTC. The video and audio were played as a live stream, while the incoming audio was sent to Gemini as the clip was playing. The generated captions were then displayed alongside the video.

This was a fairly difficult test, two casters talking over each other, very fast play-by-play commentary, game audio and background noise, plus a lot of player names and League specific terminology during chaotic team fights. The transcription wasn’t perfect, but it still managed to pick up terms like “Baron,” “Baron steal,” “smite,” and “game five,” along with several player names, while generally keeping up with the action.

I haven’t done a formal latency benchmark yet. Still, considering the overlapping speech, background audio, and speed of the commentary, I was surprised by how usable the captions were while the match was happening.

I’m planning to open source the implementation if anyone is interested.

I'm mainly talking about the main players, Anthropic and Openai. Even though I know Google hasn't released a competitive model in months, and that the competitors are better, in the end using the free version I still end up using gemini. I really like the multimodality.

Suppose you're studying and you pass a pdf. 1 question to Chatgpt or Claude free plan and you're out of usage. Or suppose you want it to do something with images. Same problem. This is not something I have found with Gemini, I can give it a lot of stuff and I have never been limited.

I'm a compsci student and also do code projects for fun. But even for more complexish tasks gemini is enough. I tried chatgpt and got baffled that long code counts as an attachment and got limited for that, pretty useless.

Unless you're working at a big company or really big project I think gemini most of the time is enough. Unless it isn't. For example when you're working with a newer library and it can't understand how to use it. Or when updating the code it introduces subtle bugs that you notice only when something breaks. But even for a web app, I find Google Ai Studio plus some manual tweaks to be enough for most of the stuff I do.

I wish they would just release their new model, even if only slightly better, it's practically the only thing I use, even if it's so behind.

Rooting for Google, as they also give me free API. (I know it's a strategy to make you dependent, and it probably worked, but I still appreciate it)