Google launches Nano Banana Pro powered by Gemini 3
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Google On Thursday, it launched Nano Banana Pro, its latest image editing and creation tool, and the company continues its momentum after launching its new Gemini AI model earlier this week.
The product was developed on the Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced on Tuesday and reached record levels.
Alphabet’s shares rose 4% on Thursday.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities go beyond the original version that launched in late August.
“It’s incredible at infographics. It can create slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images or five different characters and maintain some sort of character consistency,” he said.
He added that internal users are testing the feature by entering code snippets and even adding their LinkedIn resumes to create infographics.
“I think the ability to visualize things that existed before is not something you might think of as a visual tool, which tends to be one of the magic things that people find with it,” Woodward said.
The original Nano Banana went viral on social media, with users turning photos of themselves or their pets into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Woodward wrote: x post In September, it was revealed that the product helped add 13 million new users to the Gemini app in four days.
Nano Banana Pro is currently available in limited free quotas in the Gemini app, Google’s writing assistant NotebookLM, as well as in the company’s developer, enterprise and advertising products.
Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will be able to access the product in Google’s search features AI Mode.
The feature will later be available in Flow, Google’s AI movie-making tool, first to Ultra subscribers.
Google has introduced another feature in its Gemini app that allows users to upload any image and find out if it was created by Google AI.
Images created on free Nano Banana accounts will have a watermark, but for Google AI Ultra subscribers, this watermark will be removed.
Google is working to gain ground on OpenAI in the race for generative AI that has been ignited after the 2022 launch of ChatGPT.
Last week, the company announced two updates to OpenAI’s GPT-5 model to make it “more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use” as well as being “warmer and more chatty by default.”
ChatGPT currently tops the list of free apps on the Apple App Store, while Gemini comes in second.
Google said in a post that its Gemini app currently has more than 650 million monthly active users, and Gemini-powered AI Overview has 2 billion monthly users. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in October that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users.
Demand for Google AI products is growing, Woodward said, and many users are signing up for Gemini’s subscription plan to get “higher limits on some of these advanced models.”
“We’re seeing a lot of people coming to a lot of these products,” he said. “That’s really the best problem to have, there’s a lot of demand and we’re trying to figure out how we can serve that.”
The company wants to continue scaling its AI offerings, Woodward said, highlighting Flow, Google’s AI moviemaking tool, and Genie, a “world-building” model currently available as a limited research preview.
