Google's built-in Gemini assistant in Chrome is now available to users in India, Canada, and New Zealand, expanding beyond the tool's initial English-language markets.
The India launch is the more interesting piece here. Gemini in Chrome will support eight Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. That covers roughly 900 million native speakers across those languages, making this one of the larger multilingual rollouts for a browser-integrated AI assistant.
For context, Gemini in Chrome lets you interact with Google's AI model directly from the browser address bar or sidebar - summarizing pages, answering questions about what you're reading, and helping with writing tasks. It launched in the US and select markets earlier, but language support was limited to English and a handful of European languages.
The multilingual angle matters more than the geographic expansion itself. Most AI assistants still work best in English, and local-language support tends to be an afterthought. Google has an advantage here because of its existing translation infrastructure and the sheer volume of Indian-language training data it has accumulated through Search and YouTube over the years.
Canada and New Zealand get the standard English-language version, which is straightforward enough. India is where this gets tested in a real way - handling code-switching between English and local languages, regional idioms, and scripts that many competing AI tools still struggle with.
For the 600+ million internet users in India, this puts a capable AI assistant inside the browser they are most likely already using. Whether the local-language quality holds up in practice is the real question Google needs to answer.