Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- In the Google app beta version 15.34.32.29.arm64, we found toggles for three new extensions for Gemini: WhatsApp, Notifications, and Messages.
- The WhatsApp and Messages extensions will allow Gemini to read and send messages and make calls through their respective apps.
- The Notifications extension will enable Gemini to send or read Android system notifications.
The tech giant has been strategically enhancing Gemini’s functionality with new extensions. After adding extensions for Google apps like Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, along with YouTube and YouTube Music, recent findings suggest even more exciting additions are on the horizon.
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.
In the Google app version 15.34.32.29.arm64 beta, we could enable the toggles for new Gemini extensions for WhatsApp, Google Messages, and Android system notifications. While they aren’t working just yet, their official descriptions provide a glimpse into what they might offer.
The Messages extension seems straightforward, enabling reading and replying to messages using the Google Messages app. Then there’s the WhatsApp extension. It could become a real crowd-pleaser, letting you send messages, read them, and even make WhatsApp calls — all with just a voice command.
The Notifications extension, however, opens up intriguing possibilities. Imagine Gemini summarizing notifications received while you were away, categorizing them by importance, or even executing tasks based on specific app notifications. Picture this: your mom calls, and every alarm in your house starts blaring. Okay, maybe that’s extreme, but you get the idea.
Of course, this is all hypothesis for now, and we’ll need to wait a bit longer to see these extensions in action for ourselves. For those of us who’ve been using smartphones since the dawn of time, it might seem like overkill to have an AI assistant do all these basic tasks for us, but first-time smartphone users might come to see AI-driven interactions as the default way to navigate their devices. They might even wonder how anyone ever managed without them.
As Google keeps adding third-party apps into Gemini’s growing toolbox, it looks like the race for AI assistant domination is just getting started. Apple is also expected to roll out some cool new tricks with its AI-infused Siri on the upcoming iPhone 16 series, which will debut on September 9.
