How it’s Made: Interacting with Gemini through multimodal prompting

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Gemini got it! It looked at these images and correctly inferred that cups 1 and 3 are being swapped. And it reasoned correctly about how to update the ball position. Let’s ask:

Tell me where the ball is and summarize how it got there, in paragraph form.

Gemini: The ball is in cup 3.

Starting with the ball in cup 3, the first swap was cup 2 and 3. This put the ball in cup 2. The second swap was cup 1 and 2. This put the ball in cup 1. The third swap was cup 1 and 3. This put the ball in cup 3.

Not only did Gemini get the answer correctly, it accurately summarized the game history. Of course, it won’t always get this challenge right. Sometimes the fake out move (where you swap two empty cups) seems to trip it up, but sometimes it gets that too. But simple prompts like this make it really fun to rapidly test Gemini. You can change the variables in your prompt, including the order of swaps, and see how it does.

🔨 Tool use

If you want to use Gemini in your own apps, you’ll want it to be able to connect to other tools. Let’s try a simple idea where Gemini needs to combine multimodality with tool use: drawing a picture to search for music.

A musical instruments and palm tree sketch on a notebook. The sketch features a guitar, an amplifier, a drum set, and a palm tree drawn in a loose and expressive style. The notebook sits on a wooden desk.

Step 1. Look at this drawing, describe everything in it, and come up with a fun, specific idea for a good musical soundtrack genre, mood, or soundtrack.

Step 2. Provide a search query in the form: “Search [insert query]”

Gemini:

The drawing is of a guitar, drums, and an amplifier. There is also a palm tree. The mood is fun, upbeat, and tropical. The genre is reggae. The soundtrack could be used for a movie or TV show set in a tropical location.

Search “Reggae music for a tropical vacation”

Nice! Gemini both reasons about what it sees and then generates a search query you can parse to do a search. It’s like Gemini is acting like a translator for you – but instead of translating between languages, it’s translating modalities – from drawing to music in this case. With multimodal prompting, you can use Gemini to invent your own entirely new translations between different inputs and outputs.

🕹️Game creation

What if we tried using Gemini to quickly prototype a multimodal game? Here’s an idea: a geography guessing game where you have to point at a map to make your guess. Let’s start by prompting Gemini with the core idea:

Instructions: Let’s play a game. Think of a country and give me a clue. The clue must be specific enough that there is only one correct country. I will try pointing at the country on a map.

Next, let’s give Gemini an example turn of gameplay, showing it how we want it to handle both incorrect and correct answers:

Country: This country is huge island that is mostly covered in ice.(Answer: Greenland)

Guess:

An image of a world map, a hand icon with the index finger pointing at Canada

I am pointing at the country of Canada *incorrect*

Guess:

An image of a world map, a hand icon with the index finger pointing at Greenland

I am pointing at the country of Greenland *correct*

Let’s give it a go and prompt Gemini to generate a clue:

Clue:

This country is known for its unique wildlife, including kangaroos and koalas. (Answer: Australia)

Ok, that’s a good clue. Let’s test out whether pointing will work. Just for fun, let’s try pointing at the wrong place first:

Guess:

A person pointing at Brazil on a map of the world with their right index finger. The map includes blue oceans, and green continents with no country borders.

I am pointing at the country of Brazil *incorrect*

Great! Gemini looked at my image and figured out I’m pointing at Brazil, and correctly reasoned that’s wrong. Now let’s point at the right place on the map:

I am pointing at the country of Australia *correct*

Nice! We’ve basically taught Gemini our game logic just by giving it an example. You’ll also notice that it generalized from the illustrated hand in the examples.

⌨️ Coding

Of course, to bring your game idea to life, you’ll eventually have to write some executable code. Let’s see if Gemini can make a simple countdown timer for a game, but with a few fun twists:

Implement a simple timer in HTML/CSS/Javascript. Use a sans serif font and dark mode. Start it at 10 seconds and start counting down. When it reaches zero, replace the timer with a random emoji that is associated with excitement and motivation! Then go back to the timer at 10 seconds and start counting down again.

With just this single instruction, Gemini gives us a working timer that does what we asked for:

An animated gif of a countdown timer starting from 10. At the end of the countdown, a rocket emoji is shown followed lightning bolt emoji and a confetti emoji.

My favorite part is scrolling through Gemini’s source code to find the array of motivational emojis it picked for me:

const emojis = [‘🚀’, ‘⚡️’, ‘🎉’, ‘🎊’, ‘🥳’, ‘🤩’, ‘✨’];

👀 A sneak peek

Throughout this post, we’ve been giving Gemini an input, and having Gemini make predictions for what might come next. That’s basically what prompting is. And our inputs have been multimodal – image and text, combined.

But so far we’ve only shown Gemini responding in text. Maybe you’re wondering, can Gemini also respond with a combination of image and text? It can! This is a capability of Gemini called “interleaved text and image generation.” While this feature won’t be ready in the first version of Gemini for people to try, we hope to roll it out soon. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s possible.

Let’s see if we could use Gemini to provide everyday creative inspiration. And let’s try it in a domain that requires a bit of multimodal reasoning … knitting! 🧶. Similar to our map game above, let’s provide one example turn of interaction:

Give me three ideas for crochet creations I could make with these two colors:

Balls of blue and yellow yarn on a wooden table.

Colors: I see blue and yellow yarn.

Idea 1: How about a cute dog with one yellow ear?

Image 1:

A blue and yellow crocheted dog head with ears placed on a wooden table.

Idea 2: Or how about a jellyfish with a few yellow tentacles?

Image 2:

A blue and yellow crocheted octopus with tentacles placed on a wooden table.

Idea 3: Or how about a blue cat with a yellow nose?

Image 3:

A blue and yellow crocheted cat with whiskers placed on a wooden table.

We’re essentially teaching Gemini about how we want each interaction to go: “I’ll take a photo of two balls of yarn, and I expect you (Gemini) to both come up with an idea for something I could make, and generate an image of it.”

Now, let’s show it a new pair of yarn colors it hasn’t yet seen, and see if it can generalize:

Give me three ideas for crochet creations I could make with these two colors:

Balls of blue and pink yarn on a wooden table.

Gemini:

Colors: I see blue and pink yarn.

Idea 1: How about a pig with blue ears?

Image 1:

A blue and pink crocheted pig face with ears placed on a wooden table.

Idea 2: Or an octopus with pink and blue tentacles?

Image 2:

Idea 3: Or a bunny with a pink nose?

Image 3:

A blue and pink crocheted bunny placed on a wooden table.

Nice! Gemini correctly reasoned about the new colors (“I see blue and pink yarn”) and generated these ideas and the images in a single, interleaved output of text and image.

What Gemini did here is fundamentally different from today’s text-to-image models. It’s not just passing an instruction to a separate text-to-image model. It sees the image of my actual yarn on my wooden table, truly doing multimodal reasoning about my text and image together.

What’s Next?

We hope you found this a helpful starter guide to get a sense of what’s possible with Gemini. We’re very excited to roll it out to more people soon so you can explore your own ideas through prompting. Stay tuned!

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