Google Cloud

Let's go Bananas with GenMedia — Guillaume Vernade, Google DeepMind

May 18, 2026 · 1:17:14

Guillaume Vernade from Google DeepMind demonstrates the full GenMedia stack—Nano Banana for images, Veo for video, Lyria for music, and TTS—by illustrating an open-source book live. The core insight is that Gemini acts as the prompt engineer for every other model, and this works partly because the gen media models were trained on prompts written by Gemini. He shows how to generate character portraits, chapter scenes, animated video clips using images as first frames, and distinct music per chapter, with Lyria Realtime allowing continuous music that responds to new prompts like a DJ. A new interactions API caches context server-side to make chained multi-turn calls cheaper. For TTS, he uses a trick: assigning different speaking styles (e.g., long poetic pauses vs. breathless stutter) to the same two voices to create four distinct-sounding characters.

AI Engineering with the Google Gemini 2.5 Model Family - Philipp Schmid, Google DeepMind

Jul 11, 2025 · 1:44:51

In this workshop, Philipp Schmid from Google DeepMind demonstrates AI Engineering with the Gemini 2.5 model family, focusing on using Gemini 2.5 Flash via a free API tier for hands-on coding tasks including text generation, multimodal processing of images, audio, and PDFs, function calling with structured outputs, and integration with MCP servers. The session covers setting up API keys in AI Studio, uploading files via the Files API (free for 1 day), and controlling thinking budgets (0–24,000 tokens) to manage cost and reasoning depth. Schmid shows how Gemini natively processes videos at 1 frame per second for accurate timestamp extraction and how PDFs are handled by combining OCR text with image understanding. He introduces native tools like Google Search with grounding metadata, code execution, and URL context, and explains how MCP servers can be used seamlessly with the Gemini SDK for tool calling. The workshop also covers parallel vs sequential function calling, the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and the upcoming asynchronous function calling for the Live API, providing a practical path from simple generation to agentic workflows.

Building an AI assistant that makes phone calls [Convex Workshop]

Feb 9, 2025 · 50:53

Tom Redmond, head of DX at Convex, builds Floyd, an AI phone-calling assistant using Convex, GPT-4, Google Cloud speech-to-text, and Twilio. Floyd lets users make voice requests (e.g., calling a school to report a sick child) via a web app; transcription, context retrieval, and real-time conversation with a human on the other end happen through a reactive database architecture. Redmond explains how Convex's WebSocket-based infrastructure solves serverless latency issues, enabling live transcript streaming and status updates without polling. He demonstrates two calls (school absence and flower order), noting that latency (2–5 seconds) comes from OpenAI text-to-speech and growing prompts, with plans to use OpenAI Threads and faster TTS services. The prototype explicitly discloses it's an AI to avoid misrepresentation, and Redmond envisions AI agents efficiently handling service bookings.