ZDNET’s key takeaways
- College students ages 18+ get the Google AI Professional plan at no cost for 12 months.
- Plan contains entry to Deep Analysis, Veo 3, Jules, and extra.
- Half of a bigger $1 billion funding in AI schooling and job coaching.
As AI instruments proceed to develop, they increase past the usual question-and-answer loop and supply extra significant help for college students. Google, as an example, has instruments that may create podcasts for customers from their notes, debug code, and create in-depth experiences in seconds. Now, college students can entry all these instruments at no cost.
On Wednesday, Google mentioned that it’s providing its Google AI Professional subscription tier to school college students at no cost. To be eligible, you should be a scholar 18 or older within the US, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, or Brazil. The plan contains the entire better of Google’s AI suite of instruments, together with expanded entry to Gemini 2.5 Professional and NotebookLM, Deep Analysis, Veo 3, and Jules.
This launch comes at a time when there’s a shift in how AI is being adopted by the schooling system. Initially, the tech was met with ample resistance, with college districts even banning it. Nevertheless, extra educators and schools have gotten on board because of the rising promise of the tech in aiding studying. For a glimpse of what these instruments can do for you, hold studying under.
The Google AI Professional tier
The Google AI Professional Tier usually retails for $20 monthly and bundles all of Google’s totally different AI choices, together with one of the best fashions in Gemini and standalone instruments, into one plan. College students, specifically, can profit from many of those instruments as they make sure that the standard of the responses and help is as excessive as doable and may deal with totally different duties.
For instance, Gemini 2.5 Pro is one of the best mannequin for complicated duties resembling coding, which could possibly be useful for college students getting into disciplines resembling laptop science or software program engineering. Deep Analysis, additionally accessible in Gemini, is one other highly effective characteristic that goes past question-answer interactions by combining in-depth experiences from lots of of web sites on the internet. This could possibly be helpful when researching a subject for a paper or an examination.
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College students additionally get increased entry to NotebookLM, Google’s viral experimental AI pocket book that mixes LLMs along with your notes to additional your understanding of a subject by offering summaries, answering questions, and even discussing your content material with you. With the broader entry, customers have 5 instances increased utilization limits to a few of NotebookLM’s best options, together with Audio Overviews, notebooks, queries, and sources per pocket book. I used to be lately transformed to this device and cannot get sufficient of it.
Different enjoyable perks embody entry to Veo 3, Google’s insanely reasonable AI video generator; increased restricted in Whisk, Google’s AI image-to-video device; and Jules, an AI coding agent, which received a constructive evaluation from our resident coding and AI professional, David Gewirtz.
Maybe one of the best characteristic, in my view, is that college students get Gemini AI help infused within the Google suite of purposes, which many college students depend on for his or her on a regular basis duties. Some examples embody Gemini coediting in Google Docs, analyzing and visualizing information in Google Sheets, and creating shows in Google Slides. The additional 2TB of storage can be useful as it’s simple to build up plenty of digital content material.
Different new AI instruments
Google can be rolling out new instruments in Gemini for shopper and Workspace for EDU accounts that are supposed to make finding out extra environment friendly. For instance, Google launched Guided Studying, its response to OpenAI’s Examine Mode. As an alternative of giving a solution, it offers you a step-by-step breakdown of the subject, making certain the consumer learns the subject.
Additionally: Can AI save teachers from a crushing workload? There’s new evidence it might
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s father or mother firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit in opposition to OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI techniques.)
The corporate additionally mentioned Gemini now produces extra visuals within the responses to make sure a extra partaking studying expertise, together with high-quality pictures, sigarams, and YouTube movies. Lastly, Gemini can now create flashcards and examine guides on class supplies.
Free AI coaching
Google can be committing over $1 billion to fund extra free Google AI Coaching packages within the subsequent three years, together with AI schooling, job coaching packages, and different education-related initiates within the US.
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Lastly, Google is launching the Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative that Google mentioned “will supply free AI training, Google Career Certificates, and Google’s most superior AI instruments to each school scholar in America at no cost.” Whereas the purpose appears formidable, the corporate says that over 100 universities, representing hundreds of thousands of scholars, have already signed up.
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