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Google Brings Gemini to Windows as a Standalone Desktop App

The lightweight client places a summonable AI overlay over other programs to tie Gemini into Gmail and Drive and to offer images and video from the desktop

Overview

  • The new Gemini app runs on Windows 10 and 11 and surfaces as an overlay summoned with Alt + Space, plus a persistent workspace for multi-step, iterative tasks.
  • Google built native links to Workspace so users can pull email and document content from Gmail and Google Drive directly into Gemini conversations.
  • The app exposes multimodal creation tools called Nano Banana for images and Gemini Omni for video, letting users generate visuals from the same desktop interface.
  • Early hands-on testing found functional limits: Gemini cannot perform some Workspace actions such as deleting emails or sorting Drive files and has reliability issues when saving or generating media.
  • Google says the client is lightweight and will gain more native desktop features over time, a move meant to broaden distribution on Windows and offer an alternative to Microsoft’s Copilot for Workspace users led by product director Erin Pettigrew.