I can't seem to get it to work. It just summarizes whatever I plug in.
Edit: Even without giving it context, at best, just get a single picture and two paragraphs. Maybe they are slowly rolling the feature out. It doesn't seem to get it.
Damn... pretty good. Generated a 10 page booklet including high quality graphics and cohesive story right on point with my prompt. It would've taken me at least an hour mucking around with LLMs and image generators to get the same result that it spit out in ~30 seconds.
I asked it to create the kind of storybook my toddler would have asked for ("create a storybook about a music truck and an ice cream truck and a mailman and a carwash", inspired by his request for a story last night), and the results were certainly... interesting.
Obviously Gemini doesn't know that "music truck" is another name for "ice cream truck", but more concerningly, the illustrations it made for the trucks were this kind of eldritch amalgamation of Cars-movie style cars and people driving cars. The story was just OK, I don't think it would have kept my toddler's attention for the whole ten pages. Plus, the mailman is barely involved.
gemini app is really funny because they ship ridiculously complicated features like this before fixing the basic ability to have a chat history with apps activity turned off
Imagine the meetings where they decide to add personal illustrated storybooks before fixing chat histories
I asked it to create a story that described the modes of the major scale with a cartoon treble clef as the main character.
It created a 10 page story that stuck to the topic and was overall coherent. The main character changed color and style on every page, so no consistency there. The overall page layouts and animation style were reasonably consistent.
The metaphor it used was the character climbing a mountain and encountering other characters that represented each mode. Each supporting character was reasonably unique, although note motif was present on 3 or 4. The mountain also changed significantly and the character was frequently back at the bottom. However, in the end, he does reach the summit.
I can't say I am overly impressed but it does mostly do what they claim.
That is so cool! Thanks for the Gemini team for working on that, a great and innovative feature.
Just a heads up: as I tried to print several stories to PDF, most times one of the generated images did not appear on the PDF. It’s surely a bug of some sort, because regenerating stories eventually makes it go away. Hope these kinds of issues will be fixed soon.
Not to sound hyperbolic and this is really just the beginning of significant AI, but will there be anything left for humans to do or create when all this is done?
I gave it a properly developed story. Gemini altered it somewhat to fit it in 10 pages. It was more than acceptable. But the illustrations, asked for in the style of oil paining, could have been better. We will get there.
Does anyone in these companies stops and thinks "wtf are we actually building" ? I feel like we're in a parody, even the previous VR hype cycle seemed somewhat serious in comparison
Like, why is one of the richest man on the planet getting all giggly presenting us "a fairy sloth in a magical forest"? https://imgur.com/1naGLfp
Likewise, if you rent a book from the library, you're outsourcing your parenting to some random author.
Isn't the point of this you have a customized book in like 5 minutes, and you can spend time sharing it with your child? Presumably you aren't just throwing the book at them and telling them to read it. If you spent hours drawing a book, would that mean you can spend more time with your kids?
I am thinking about doing something similar as I learn Spanish. I know some - about at a B1 level.
Right now I’m using ChatGPT to create my own lessons and having it to draw pictures depicting sentences in Spanish and putting a caption in Spanish underneath.
It’s keeping me from having to go from Spanish -> English -> mental image directly to Spanish -> mental image
i made https://storyforu.com which generates stories for children, based on topics you select with vibrant graphics and an interactive and quiz mode.
it was fun to build it.
>Try it today in the Gemini app. Available globally on desktop and mobile
Not quite. Gemini isn't available in Hong Kong. Unfortunately instead of telling Pixel users that, they updated their phones to use Gemini instead of the functional assistant, and then whenever the assistant is accessed, it just spins forever with a "just a moment" prompt.
It's not even clear why it's disabled, since it works just fine if you pay them for workspace subscription.
I made several attempts to try to get it to generate something more esoteric. Here is a story about a computer falling in love with a potato chip who becomes a sentient meth addict.
30 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadEdit: Even without giving it context, at best, just get a single picture and two paragraphs. Maybe they are slowly rolling the feature out. It doesn't seem to get it.
That's... uh... a pretty bold description for a tool where you are in fact outsourcing the "imagination" part to the machine.
Obviously Gemini doesn't know that "music truck" is another name for "ice cream truck", but more concerningly, the illustrations it made for the trucks were this kind of eldritch amalgamation of Cars-movie style cars and people driving cars. The story was just OK, I don't think it would have kept my toddler's attention for the whole ten pages. Plus, the mailman is barely involved.
Imagine the meetings where they decide to add personal illustrated storybooks before fixing chat histories
It created a 10 page story that stuck to the topic and was overall coherent. The main character changed color and style on every page, so no consistency there. The overall page layouts and animation style were reasonably consistent.
The metaphor it used was the character climbing a mountain and encountering other characters that represented each mode. Each supporting character was reasonably unique, although note motif was present on 3 or 4. The mountain also changed significantly and the character was frequently back at the bottom. However, in the end, he does reach the summit.
I can't say I am overly impressed but it does mostly do what they claim.
Is there something lost, when it's not the adult telling the child a bedtime improv story? (IME, kids love this.)
Is something else gained by the generated storybook?
Just a heads up: as I tried to print several stories to PDF, most times one of the generated images did not appear on the PDF. It’s surely a bug of some sort, because regenerating stories eventually makes it go away. Hope these kinds of issues will be fixed soon.
Finally it gives generated text and images some sort of coherence that makes everything immediately "usable".
It is easier to develop something from a lot of text and images than having to assemble everything from zero.
Hope that it's editable too?
They refer (sort of) to a desktop app on the page, but I've never seen a Gemini desktop app. It seems they're just saying the web app on desktop...
I don't understand why Google doesn't have a true desktop app nor keyboard shortcuts. These things are so easy... (Especially the keyboard shortcuts.)
Their execution on everything but the model just seems terrible.
So many startups in that space that now get killed. Oscar Stories is going to have a hard time
Like, why is one of the richest man on the planet getting all giggly presenting us "a fairy sloth in a magical forest"? https://imgur.com/1naGLfp
Just spend more time with your kids, they want connection!
Isn't the point of this you have a customized book in like 5 minutes, and you can spend time sharing it with your child? Presumably you aren't just throwing the book at them and telling them to read it. If you spent hours drawing a book, would that mean you can spend more time with your kids?
Right now I’m using ChatGPT to create my own lessons and having it to draw pictures depicting sentences in Spanish and putting a caption in Spanish underneath.
It’s keeping me from having to go from Spanish -> English -> mental image directly to Spanish -> mental image
Not quite. Gemini isn't available in Hong Kong. Unfortunately instead of telling Pixel users that, they updated their phones to use Gemini instead of the functional assistant, and then whenever the assistant is accessed, it just spins forever with a "just a moment" prompt.
It's not even clear why it's disabled, since it works just fine if you pay them for workspace subscription.
https://g.co/gemini/share/598cc68832a9