Upcoming Gemini Storybooks sound perfect for entertaining kids
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Gemini on Android has been working to implement new Storybooks, Timeline, and Mindmap options.
- While Timeline and Mindmap come from NotebookLM on the web, Storybooks could be a new Gem for creating illustrated books.
- Storybooks is not yet functional in Gemini, but we have been able to uncover an animation associated with it.
For as powerful as generative AI systems are, their open-ended flexibility can also be a bit of a curse, especially if we’re having difficulty explaining to these systems exactly what kind of output we’re looking for. That’s one of the reasons pre-packaged solutions like Gemini’s Audio Overviews are so appealing: we just need to drop in our source materials, and we know exactly the sort of virtual podcast we’ll be getting. Today we’re checking out some progress on what could be another one of these features in the works for Gemini, as Google teaches it to generate Storybooks.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We first spotted a reference to Storybooks in Gemini a couple months back, in version 16.19.42.sa.arm64 beta of the Google Android app. While not publicly accessible at the time, Gemini was working on a chip for Storybooks, as well as Timeline and Mindmap. Those latter two are NotebookLM functions we’re already familiar with, but Storybooks seemed to be novel (no pun intended).
At the time, we couldn’t really get anything working, and all we had to go on were those names. But now we have some new developments to share. A little over a week ago, TestingCatalog reported on some analysis of the web version of Gemini, where it documented Google’s work on a Storybook Gemini Gem. And now as we tear into Google’s new 16.26.64.sa.arm64 release, we’ve identified further Storybook resources.
For starters, we’ve found this new animation that sure appears to depict what we think of when we picture a “Storybook.” And while we still haven’t been able to see it working in full generative action, it seems pretty clear that the target merges lush illustrations with story elements to create the sort of content your young child might love.
Like we started off by saying, AI tools are incredibly flexible, and it turns out the Gemini users have already rolled a few of their own solutions that sound very much up this same alley — there are even a couple explicitly called Storybooks and Storybook AI. While we imagine that Google is independently creating this tool, those might reasonably offer a few hints at the direction this could be headed.
At the moment, we’re able to get Gemini to display this “Create a Storybook” chip when presenting it with an image to work with, but that’s about the extent of things. Similarly, we can get those Timeline and Mindmap options to appear when prompting Gemini with a PDF. For the time being, however, none of these are working in Gemini on Android (even though Timeline and Mindmap are accessible through NotebookLM on the web).
Based on what we’ve seen Gemini create so far, especially in terms of media with Imagen and Veo, there’s the potential for Storybooks to be pretty darn impressive. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves too much, though, so we’ll keep working hard to bring you an actual example of this upcoming tool in action.
