Gemini API in action: showcase of innovative Android apps

Posted by Thomas Ezan, Sr Developer Relation Engineer

With the advent of Generative AI, Android developers now have access to capabilities that were previously out of reach. For instance, you can now easily add image captioning to your app without any computer vision knowledge.

With the upcoming launch of the stable version of VertexAI in Firebase in a few weeks (available in Beta Since Google I/O), you'll be able to effortlessly incorporate the capabilities of Gemini 1.5 Flash and Gemini 1.5 Pro into your app. The inference runs on Google's servers, making these capabilities accessible to any device with an internet connection.

Several Android developers have already begun leveraging this technology. Let's explore some of their creations.

Generate your meals for the week

The team behind Meal Planner, a meal planner and shopping list management app, is leveraging Gemini 1.5 Flash to create original meal plans. Based on the user’s diet, the number of people you are cooking for and any food allergies or intolerances, the app automatically creates a meal plan for the selected week.

For each dish, the model lists ingredients and quantities, taking into account the number of portions. It also provides instructions on how to prepare it. The app automatically generates a shopping list for the week based on the ingredient list for each meal.

To enable reliable processing of the model’s response and to integrate it in the app, the team leveraged Gemini's JSON mode. They specified responseMimeType = "application/json" in the model configuration and defined the expected JSON response schema in the prompt (see API documentation).

Following the launch of the meal generation feature, Meal Planner received overwhelmingly positive feedback. The feature simplified meal planning for users with dietary restrictions and helped reduce food waste. In the months after its introduction, Meal Planner experienced a 17% surge in premium users.

Journaling while chatting with Leo

A few months ago, the team behind the journal app Life wanted to provide an innovative way to let their users log entries. They created "Leo", an AI diary assistant chatting with users and converting conversations into a journal entry.

To modify the behavior of the model and the tone of its responses, the team used system instructions to define the chatbot persona. This allows the user to set the behavior and tone of the assistant: Pick “Professional and formal” and the model will keep the conversation strict, select “Friendly and cheerful” and it will lighten up the dialogue with lots of emojis!

The team saw an increase of user engagement following the launch of the feature.

And if you want to know more about how the Life developers used Gemini API in their app, we had a great conversation with Jomin from the team. This conversation is part of a new Android podcast series called Android Build Time, that you can also watch on YouTube.

Create a nickname on the fly

The HiiKER app provides offline hiking maps. The app also fosters a community by letting users rating trails and leaving comments. But users signing up don’t always add a username to their profile. To avoid the risk of lowering the conversion rate by making username selection mandatory at signup time, the team decided to use the Gemini API to suggest unique usernames based on the user’s country or area.

To generate original usernames, the team set a high temperature value and played with the top-K and top-P values to increase the creativity of the model.

This AI-assisted feature led to a significant lift in the percentage of users with "complete" profiles contributing to a positive impact on engagement and retention.

It’s time to build!

Generative AI is still a very new space and we are just starting to have easy access to these capabilities for Android. From enabling advanced personalization, creating delightful interactive experiences or simplifying signup, you might have unique challenges that you are trying to solve as an Android app developer. It is a great time to start looking at these challenges as opportunities that generative AI can help you tackle!

You can learn more about the advanced features of the Gemini Cloud models, find an introduction to generative AI for Android developers, and get started with Vertex AI in Firebase documentation.

To learn more about AI on Android, check out other resources we have available during AI in Android Spotlight Week.

Use #AndroidAI hashtag to share your creations or feedback on social media, and join us at the forefront of the AI revolution!