Google Gemini has become one of the most powerful AI assistants available today, but here’s the shocking truth: most users are only scratching the surface of what it can do. While millions interact with Gemini daily for basic queries, they’re completely unaware of the revolutionary features hiding right under their noses. If you’re still using Gemini like a simple chatbot, you’re missing out on capabilities that could transform your productivity, creativity, and daily workflow.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll uncover the hidden gems that make Gemini a true game-changer—from AI-powered research assistants to real-time visual guidance, personalized experiences, and collaborative coding environments. Let’s dive into the features that 95% of users don’t even know exist.
Deep Research: Your AI Research Assistant That Saves Hours
One of Gemini’s most powerful yet underutilized features is Deep Research, an agentic capability that fundamentally changes how we approach complex research tasks. Unlike traditional search engines that simply return links, Deep Research acts as your personal research assistant, conducting comprehensive investigations on your behalf.
How Deep Research Works
When you activate Deep Research, Gemini creates a multi-step research plan that you can review and approve. Once you give the green light, the AI springs into action—browsing the web, analyzing sources, and refining its search strategy just like a human researcher would. The process is fascinating to watch: Gemini shows its “thinking” process as it explores different angles, cross-references information, and builds a comprehensive understanding of your topic.
The results are nothing short of remarkable. In just a few minutes, Deep Research can scan over 100 websites and sources to generate detailed, multi-page reports complete with citations and links to original sources. This is particularly valuable for entrepreneurs conducting competitor analysis, marketers benchmarking AI-powered campaigns, or students tackling complex academic topics.
Accessing Deep Research
To use this feature, toggle the model dropdown to “Gemini 2.5 Pro with Deep Research” or “Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking with Deep Research” and enter your research question. The feature is available to Gemini Advanced users, and as of March 2025, free Gemini users can also try it with usage limits. Deep Research is powered by Gemini’s most advanced models, leveraging their sophisticated reasoning capabilities and the massive 1 million token context window to synthesize information effectively.
Gemini Live with Visual Guidance: See, Speak, and Show
While many users know about Gemini’s voice capabilities, few realize that Gemini Live has evolved into a multimodal powerhouse with visual guidance—a feature that brings AI assistance into the physical world.
Real-Time Visual Assistance
Gemini Live’s visual guidance feature allows you to share your camera feed with the AI, which can then highlight objects directly on your screen in real-time. This isn’t just passive recognition—Gemini provides on-screen cues by placing white dots, rectangles, or squares around relevant items while dimming everything else in view.
The practical applications are endless. Can’t decide between two pairs of sneakers? Point your camera at them, and Gemini will highlight the one that best matches your outfit. Need to identify the right tool in your toolbox? Show Gemini the contents, and it will point out exactly which screwdriver or wrench you need. The feature excels at helping with shopping decisions, organizing cluttered spaces, troubleshooting problems visually, and getting feedback on projects.
Availability and Integration
Visual guidance launched first on the Pixel 10 series in August 2025 and has since rolled out to other Android devices, with iOS support following shortly after. What makes this feature truly powerful is its integration with Google’s ecosystem—you can use it alongside Calendar, Tasks, and Keep for seamless scheduling and list management during conversations. Upcoming integrations will add Messages, Phone, and Clock functionality, along with enhanced Maps support.
Canvas: Your Interactive Collaborative Workspace
Canvas represents a paradigm shift in how we interact with AI for creative and coding tasks. Unlike traditional chat interfaces where responses appear in a linear conversation, Canvas provides a dedicated interactive workspace within Gemini where you can create, refine, and iterate on documents and code in real-time.
Document Creation and Editing
For writers, bloggers, and content creators, Canvas offers an intuitive environment for generating high-quality first drafts and rapidly refining them. You can highlight specific paragraphs and ask Gemini to make them more concise, professional, or informal—changes appear instantly in the workspace. The quick editing tools let you adjust tone, length, and formatting with simple commands, making it perfect for crafting speeches, revising essays, blog posts, or reports.
Coding with Confidence
Canvas truly shines for developers and programming students. It transforms the coding process by allowing you to generate and preview HTML, React code, and other web app prototypes directly within the interface. You can see a visual representation of your design as you work, making iterative improvements with Gemini’s assistance without switching between multiple applications.
One user shared their experience creating a game with Canvas, noting that Gemini “writes the code, runs the code, and fixes its own errors” to deliver a fully functional result with working progress bars and polished visuals—all from a single prompt. This level of automation and real-time collaboration makes Canvas particularly valuable for rapid prototyping and learning coding concepts.
Accessing Canvas
Canvas is available globally to Gemini and Gemini Advanced subscribers in all supported languages. To start creating, simply select “Canvas” from the prompt bar on the web or tap the “+” icon and select “Canvas” on mobile.
Gems: Create Your Own AI Experts
Gems are one of Gemini’s best-kept secrets—custom AI assistants that you can create for any recurring task or specialized need. Think of Gems as personalized versions of Gemini, each with unique instructions, knowledge, and behavior patterns tailored to help you exactly how you want.
Building Custom Assistants
Creating a Gem is remarkably simple. Visit gemini.google.com, click “Gem Manager,” then “New Gem,” and provide a name and instructions for your custom assistant. You can define the Gem’s persona, specify tasks it should perform, provide context about your needs, and set the desired output format. For example, you could create a Gem that acts as an upbeat running coach, a patient coding tutor, or a creative brainstorming partner with specific expertise.
What makes Gems truly powerful is their ability to retain context and specialized knowledge. You can upload up to 10 PDFs or images for your Gem to reference, creating an AI assistant that understands your specific materials and requirements. This functionality is perfect for budget tracking, creative coaching, writing assistance with specific style guides, or project-specific help.
Pre-Made Gems and Customization
For users who want to get started quickly, Gemini offers pre-made Gems including Brainstormer, Career Guide, Coding Partner, Learning Coach, and Writing Editor. These templates can be copied and modified, allowing you to add your own instructions and preferences without starting from scratch.
Gems are available to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users and can be accessed directly from Gemini’s side panel. They represent a significant step toward truly personalized AI assistance, making Gemini adapt to your unique needs rather than forcing you to adapt to the AI.
Audio Overviews: Transform Content into Engaging Podcasts
Audio Overviews, powered by the same technology behind NotebookLM, allow you to convert documents, slides, Deep Research reports, and other content into engaging podcast-style conversations. This feature transforms static information into dynamic discussions between two AI hosts who analyze, summarize, and discuss your content from different perspectives.
Converting Documents to Audio
The process is beautifully simple. Upload your files or generate a Deep Research report, then click “Create” followed by “Audio Overview”. Within minutes, Gemini generates a conversational audio experience where AI hosts discuss your content, make connections between topics, and offer fresh perspectives. The audio quality is remarkably natural, with hosts incorporating pitch, rhythm, and intonation for a realistic listening experience.
This feature is particularly valuable for learning on the go, reviewing research materials during commutes, or processing complex information through auditory learning. Students can transform lecture notes into review sessions, professionals can turn industry reports into commute-friendly briefings, and researchers can absorb academic papers while exercising or traveling.
NotebookLM vs Gemini Audio Overviews
While NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews offer comprehensive coverage with longer formats and interactive modes, Gemini’s implementation provides seamless integration with Deep Research and broader topic exploration. Gemini can analyze dozens of websites including community forums like Reddit, processing up to 104+ websites per research session before generating both detailed reports and audio summaries in one platform.
Audio Overviews are available to Gemini users and represent a revolutionary way to consume information, making complex topics accessible through natural conversation.
Also Read: NotebookLM Made Simple: A Beginner’s Guide to Google’s AI Notebook
Multimodal Live API: Real-Time Streaming Capabilities
For developers and businesses, the Multimodal Live API represents one of Gemini’s most advanced yet underutilized capabilities. This stateful API uses WebSockets to enable low-latency, bidirectional voice and video interactions with Gemini, processing continuous streams of audio, video, or text to deliver immediate, human-like responses.
Key Capabilities
The Multimodal Live API offers several groundbreaking features that set it apart:
Bidirectional Streaming: Allows concurrent sending and receiving of text, audio, and video data, creating truly interactive experiences.
Native Multimodality: The model can see, hear, and speak, processing multiple input types simultaneously.
Session Memory: Gemini retains memory of all interactions within a single session, recalling previously heard or seen information.
Tool Integration: Supports function calling, code execution, search grounding, and combining multiple tools within a single request.
Low Latency: Provides fast, real-time responses suitable for natural conversations where users can interrupt the model using voice commands.
Real-World Applications
The Multimodal Live API enables developers to build applications for visual customer support where AI can see and guide users through problems, real-time language translation with voice and video input, interactive educational tools that respond to student demonstrations, and live video analysis for quality control or monitoring applications. The API is available in Google AI Studio and through the Gemini API, with partner integrations from Daily, LiveKit, and Voximplant to streamline development.
Google Workspace Integration: AI Across Your Workflow
One of Gemini’s most powerful yet often overlooked advantages is its deep integration across Google Workspace. This isn’t just about having AI in one app—it’s about having intelligent assistance seamlessly woven throughout your entire productivity ecosystem.
Side Panel Assistance
Gemini operates directly within Google Workspace through a side panel interface, providing contextual AI support in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Calendar, Chat, and Tasks without switching tabs or applications. This integration enables powerful workflows like retrieving relevant documents and emails instantly, summarizing conversations and presentations in context, automating repetitive formatting tasks, and maintaining consistency across different applications.
App-Specific Features
Each Workspace app has specialized Gemini capabilities tailored to its purpose:
Gmail: Generate email drafts based on meeting notes, rephrase messages for appropriate tone, summarize long email threads, and create contextual smart replies using insights from connected files.
Docs: Summarize large documents, reorganize sections, generate outlines, and on Android devices, even generate AI images directly within documents.
Sheets: Analyze tabular data, fill missing information, create formulas and pivot tables, and organize large datasets automatically.
Drive: Summarize files without opening them using the “Summarize this file” feature introduced in August 2025.
Meet: Automatically generate structured meeting summaries with action items using the “Take Notes for Me” feature, available in multiple languages.
To access these features, users need to enable smart features and personalization in Gmail settings—a critical step that many users miss. Navigate to Gmail Settings > General, search for “smart features,” and enable both “Smart Features” and “Google Workspace Smart Features”.
Gemini Thinking Mode: Transparent Reasoning
Thinking Mode represents a fundamental advancement in how AI models approach complex problems. The Gemini 2.5 series models use an internal “thinking process” that significantly improves their reasoning and multi-step planning abilities, setting them apart from models that simply generate responses.
How Thinking Mode Works
Rather than immediately providing answers, Thinking Mode allows Gemini to engage in detailed reasoning before responding. The model produces thought summaries that showcase its decision-making process, offering transparency into how it arrives at conclusions. This is particularly valuable for complex problem-solving, multi-step reasoning tasks, detailed analysis and planning, and code generation and debugging.
Developers can customize the thinking process by setting a “thinking budget”—an allocation of 0 to 24,576 tokens that guides how much computational effort the model dedicates to reasoning. For complex tasks, budgets of 8,000-16,000 tokens are recommended, while simpler queries may require minimal thinking.
Performance Benefits
Thinking Mode delivers enhanced performance on challenging tasks. Gemini 2.5 Pro with thinking capabilities ranks #1 on LMArena by significant margins and excels on benchmarks measuring programming, reasoning, and math. The transparent reasoning process helps users verify the model’s approach, understand complex answers, keep informed during longer tasks, and identify where reasoning might need adjustment.
The feature works seamlessly with all of Gemini’s tools and capabilities, allowing the model to interact with external systems, execute code, or access real-time information while incorporating results into its reasoning.
Personalization with Search History: Truly Tailored Responses
Personalization (experimental) represents Gemini’s most ambitious attempt at creating a truly individualized AI assistant. This feature allows Gemini to access your Google Search history to deliver responses that are specifically aligned with your interests, preferences, and past explorations.
How Personalization Works
When you select “Personalization (experimental)” from the model dropdown, Gemini analyzes your prompt to determine if your past searches can enhance the answer. For example, if you request travel recommendations, Gemini might reference your previous searches about Berlin, Vancouver, or other destinations to provide personalized suggestions.
The system is intelligent about when to use this data—it only references your search history when the AI believes it will genuinely improve the relevance and quality of its response. Google emphasizes that users maintain complete control: you can disconnect your search history at any time through a banner link provided before entering prompts.
Expanding Personalization
This feature is part of a broader personalization initiative that will eventually connect Gemini with YouTube and Google Photos. This expansion aims to enable the chatbot to offer more tailored insights by leveraging a deeper understanding of your habits and preferences across Google’s ecosystem.
Personalization is available in over 40 languages across most countries (though temporarily excluded from the European Economic Area, UK, and Switzerland) and works for both free and Gemini Advanced users on web and mobile. To activate it, you must first enable ‘Web & App Activity’ in your Google account settings, which allows Google to record your activity on selected sites and apps.
Veo 2: AI-Powered Video Generation
Veo 2 brings professional-quality video generation directly into Gemini, allowing users to transform text descriptions into stunning eight-second video clips. This state-of-the-art model excels at interpreting both simple and complex instructions, generating videos that accurately simulate real-world physics and capture diverse visual and cinematic styles.
Creating Videos with Veo 2
Using Veo 2 is remarkably straightforward. Gemini Advanced subscribers simply select “Veo 2” from the model dropdown and describe the scene they want to create—whether it’s a short story, visual concept, or specific cinematic shot. The more detailed your description, the more control you have over the final result, including specific visual styles from photorealism to animated fantasy.
Veo 2 generates videos at 720p resolution in 16:9 landscape format as MP4 files. The model demonstrates superior understanding of physics, human movement, and expressions, supporting commands for various genres, cinematic styles, and lens effects. Users can easily share their creations on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts directly from the mobile app.
Advanced Capabilities
Beyond basic text-to-video generation, Veo has expanded with several advanced features:
Video Extension: Extend previously generated videos for longer sequences.
Frame-Specific Generation: Generate videos by specifying first and last frames for precise control.
Image-to-Video: Use reference images to guide video content, with newer Veo 3.1 supporting up to three reference images.
Native Audio: Recent Veo versions natively generate synchronized audio alongside video, eliminating the need for separate sound design.
There is a monthly limit on video generation, but Gemini notifies users as they approach it. This feature opens up creative possibilities that were previously accessible only through specialized video editing software.
Gemini CLI Extensions: Customizable Command-Line Power
For developers who live in the terminal, Gemini CLI extensions represent a revolutionary framework for customizing and connecting Gemini to the tools they use most. These extensions transform Gemini CLI from a simple AI assistant into a comprehensive, personalized development environment.
Installing and Using Extensions
Each extension contains a built-in “playbook” that instantly teaches the AI how to use new tools effectively, delivering meaningful results from the very first command without complex setup. Installing an extension is simple: just type gemini extensions install <GitHub URL or local path> from your command line.
Partner Ecosystem
Google launched Gemini CLI extensions with strong partner support, including:
Dynatrace: Real-time insights into application performance and root-cause analysis.
Elastic: Search and analyze Elasticsearch data in developer workflows.
Figma: Generate code from frames and ensure design system consistency.
Harness: AI-powered CI/CD intelligence with pipeline analysis and automated remediation.
Postman: Manage collections, evaluate APIs, and automate workflows through natural language.
Shopify: Connect to Shopify’s developer ecosystem with doc search and API tools.
Snyk: Integrate comprehensive security capabilities into development processes.
Stripe: Define tools for AI agents to interact with the Stripe API and knowledge base.
The open ecosystem allows anyone to build integrations, and Google has launched a Gemini CLI Extensions page where users can discover a growing catalog ranked by popularity.
Enabling Hidden Features: Essential Setup Steps
Many of Gemini’s most powerful features remain hidden because users haven’t completed essential setup steps. Here’s how to unlock Gemini’s full potential:
Gmail Settings Configuration
Navigate to Gmail Settings > General, press CMD/CTRL + F, search for “smart features,” and enable both “Smart Features” and “Google Workspace Smart Features”. This critical step enables Gemini’s side panel functionality across Workspace apps.
Extension Management
In the Gemini web interface, go to Settings > Apps and selectively enable only the extensions you actually use. Keeping unnecessary extensions disabled prevents accidental triggers and streamlines your workflow. Available extensions include Google Workspace, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Home, OpenStax, Utilities, Phone, Messages, and Spotify.
Model Selection
Gemini offers multiple models optimized for different tasks. Use the model dropdown to access:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro: Maximum intelligence for complex reasoning and coding
- Gemini 2.5 Flash: Optimized for speed and cost-efficiency
- Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking: Enhanced reasoning with transparent thought processes
- Gemini with Deep Research: For comprehensive research reports
- Personalization (experimental): For search history-based personalization
- Veo 2: For video generation
Understanding which model to use for which task maximizes both performance and cost-effectiveness.
Conclusion: Unlocking Gemini’s True Potential
The features covered in this guide represent just the beginning of what Gemini can do. From Deep Research conducting hours of investigation in minutes, to Visual Guidance bringing AI into the physical world, to Canvas enabling real-time collaboration, to Gems creating personalized AI experts—these capabilities transform Gemini from a simple chatbot into a comprehensive AI ecosystem.
The reason 95% of users miss these features isn’t because they’re hard to find—it’s because they require a shift in how we think about AI assistance. Instead of asking one-off questions, Gemini invites us to engage in deeper collaboration, whether that’s researching complex topics, creating content, coding applications, or integrating AI throughout our daily workflows.
By taking the time to explore these hidden features, configure the essential settings, and experiment with different capabilities, you can unlock productivity gains that seemed impossible just a few years ago. The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here, hiding in plain sight within the tools we use every day.
Don’t be part of the 95% who miss out. Start exploring these game-changing features today, and discover how Gemini can transform your work, creativity, and problem-solving capabilities.
Ready to unlock Gemini’s full potential? Visit gemini.google.com and start experimenting with these powerful features now!
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