Gemini API
Definition
Google's API for accessing the Gemini family of multimodal AI models, offering text, image, audio, and video understanding capabilities with native function calling support.
Google’s Gemini API provides programmatic access to Google’s family of multimodal AI models, designed to understand and generate text, images, audio, and video content.
Why It Matters
Gemini represents Google’s unified approach to multimodal AI, combining their expertise in language, vision, and audio understanding. For AI engineers, it offers an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic with unique strengths in multimodal processing and integration with Google Cloud services.
Key advantages:
- Native multimodal understanding (text, images, audio, video)
- Long context windows (up to 2M tokens with Gemini 3)
- Strong reasoning capabilities
- Competitive pricing for production use
- Deep integration with Google Cloud Platform
Implementation Basics
Getting started with Gemini API:
- Authentication: Obtain an API key from Google AI Studio or use Google Cloud credentials
- Model selection: Choose between Gemini 3 Pro or Gemini 3 Flash based on your needs
- Request format: Similar structure to other LLM APIs with messages array and system instructions
- Response handling: Parse responses including safety ratings and usage metadata
The Gemini API supports function calling, structured output with JSON schemas, and streaming responses. It integrates well with Vertex AI for enterprise deployments requiring VPC networking, custom endpoints, and compliance features.
For multimodal applications, Gemini can process images and videos alongside text in a single request, making it particularly useful for document analysis, video understanding, and applications requiring cross-modal reasoning.