Overview
- Google announced Tuesday that Gemini’s Nano Banana–powered personalized image generation is now free for eligible U.S. users after they opt in to Personal Intelligence, a feature that connects Gemini to Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and Search to infer user preferences.
- Free access carries eligibility and usage limits: users must be at least 18, sign into a personal Google account in a supported region, and free-tier outputs have lower download and quota caps while higher-resolution images and larger usage remain behind paid Google AI plans.
- Google released Nano Banana 2 Lite as a low-cost, high-throughput image model that generates text-to-image outputs in about four seconds and is priced around $0.034 per 1K-resolution image, and it is available via Google AI Studio, the Gemini API and consumer surfaces like the Gemini app.
- Gemini Omni Flash entered public preview for developers through Google AI Studio and the Gemini API as a conversational video generation and editing model priced at about $0.10 per second with current limits such as 10-second outputs and some character-consistency issues.
- Google says both Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash embed SynthID watermarking and provide verification in Gemini and Search to mark AI-created or edited media, a step meant to improve provenance even as the rollout excludes Europe because of regional regulatory constraints.