Google has extended a free year of Google AI Plus (or Pro if you\u2019re an American student) to qualifying students worldwide. The stated reason for this is \u201cso students can make the most of this school year,\u201d but Google isn\u2019t really doing this out of the goodness of its corporate heart.<\/p>\n
The adage of \u2018get them while they\u2019re young\u2019 applies to everything from the smoking industry to religion to social media. Scooping up new AI users can only help the internet giant\u2019s figures, even if they\u2019re not paying for their subscriptions. Eventually, they will. At least, that\u2019s the hope<\/a>.<\/p>\n AI Plus strings attached<\/p>\n It\u2019s not like Google is offering students nothing with its AI Plus offer, though. AI Plus usually costs R105\/m for South Africans. Students who can prove they\u2019re students get twelve months\u2019 access free of charge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Included in the package are 400GB of cloud data storage, access to Gemini Omni, and a doubling of Gemini\u2019s rate limits. The company reckons students will find numerous tools to assist their education journey within the subscription. A student hub helps with notes, organisation, study prep, and mock tests. Study notebooks, a relatively new feature<\/a>, acts as an AI teacher and assessor. That\u2019s apparently due for upgrades soon, as well.<\/p>\n Then there are interactive visualisations that are supposed to hammer concepts into your head. Finally, Gemini Live has just gained Deep Research access. That\u2019ll let students analyse and create \u201ccomprehensive, multi-step research reports and chat with Gemini\u201d via web or mobile interfaces in \u201ca natural, conversational way.\u201d<\/p>\n There are probably still some hurdles to overcome for South African students. To qualify, they\u2019ll need to verify their student IDs through SheerID. A payment method is also needed, though it\u2019ll only begin deductions once a year has passed. Time is limited, though. The offer is only available for sign-up until 31 December, 2026. Quite clever, really. Imagine losing access to your study buddy just before the big year-end push. It might just convince you that Google AI Plus is worth paying for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google has extended a free year of Google AI Plus (or Pro if you\u2019re an American student) to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,7010,72290,10779,132,1429,2505],"class_list":["post-147119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-free","tag-gemini-plus","tag-global","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}