Marc Benioff is ‘absolutely blown away’ by Google’s new Gemini AI voice assistant

Google’s (GOOGL+0.91%) new artificial intelligence-powered voice assistant has at least one tech chief as a fan.

Salesforce (CRM-1.09%) chief executive Marc Benioff posted on X that he is “absolutely blown away” by Google’s Gemini Live — a new voice assistant that handles natural conversations with interruptions and topic changes.

“Speaking directly to AI with zero latency—this voice interaction is the future of consumer AI,” Benioff wrote, tagging Google chief executive Sundar Pichai.

Pichai responded, “Glad you like it! Lots more to come:),” to Benioff’s post.

X-owner Elon Musk also responded to Benioff’s post, writing, “AI is advancing insanely fast.”

Google launched its Gemini AI chatbot as an iPhone app last week. Gemini Live, which was previously unavailable on Gemini through Google’s iPhone app or through a web browser, offers ten distinct voice options and supports 12 languages, including Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi, with more planned.

The launch of Google Live comes as the AI race between tech giants pivots from AI chatbots to AI assistants, or as some are calling them, AI agents. Unlike AI chatbots, AI agents are built to handle tasks autonomously.

In October, Microsoft (MSFT+0.02%) announced that it was adding the ability for Copilot users to build their own autonomous agents in Copilot Studio that can “understand the nature of your work and act on your behalf.” And OpenAI, whose technology powers much of Microsoft’s AI, reportedly plans to launch an autonomous agent called “Operator” in January that can handle tasks like coding and travel booking.

Meanwhile, Google is reportedly focusing its AI rivalry with OpenAI on “reasoning” models. Teams at Google have made progress in recent months on software for AI models that resemble humanlike reasoning abilities, Bloomberg reported in October. Google has long focused on “reasoning” capabilities in large language models (LLMs), including in its work on chain-of-thought prompting.