Your smartwatch is about to get a lot more productive. For the first time, Google is bringing its Gemini AI assistant to your wrist.

The company announced the news on Wednesday during Samsung’s Unpacked event, where Samsung also unveiled its new Galaxy Watch 8 series of smartwatches. The Galaxy Watch 8 and Galaxy Watch 8 Classic will be the first to debut with Gemini built-in right out of the box, but it’s also headed to newer Pixel watches, the OnePlus Watch 3, as well as Oppo and Xiaomi smartwatches later this month. 

Gemini on Wear OS is designed to handle voice commands more naturally than older assistants, so you can speak casually and not have to resort to more robotic phrasing or have to constantly repeat commands. In practice, this makes for an assistant that’s faster, more conversational and that generally feels closer to a human than previous digital assistants.  

I visited Google’s New York City headquarters for a live demo of Gemini in action across a few different smartwatches, including models from Oppo, Google and Samsung. I was impressed by how well it handled long, stream-of-consciousness questions without missing a beat.

For example, I asked for “that famous bridge shot in Brooklyn that’s all over social media,” and Gemini immediately pulled up the right landmark. From there, I just said, “show me photos,” and it displayed images of the bridge without having to repeat its name. A simple “take me there” command then brought up directions automatically.

What really stood out, though, was how Gemini handled on-screen results. Where past assistants often stopped at partial answers or kicked you to a website, Gemini summarized the information out loud in a natural-sounding voice. I didn’t even have to glance at the watch. It also handled more complex tasks, like researching how long to cook a soft-boiled egg, which it automatically set a timer for.

Gemini also streamlined messaging. Instead of the typical multi-step process — pulling up contacts, dictating a message, then confirming — it handled everything with a single command. In one demo, a tester asked Gemini to “find trendy Korean restaurants in New York and text Laura in Korean to see if they want to join.” Gemini completed the entire task, even composing the message in Korean. While I couldn’t personally verify the translation, the tester confirmed it was accurate.

Even though this is Gemini’s first step into smartwatches, it’s already been a major presence on phones for the past year. On supported Android phones, the AI assistant can handle everything from drafting messages, summarizing emails and managing smart home devices to more advanced features like image generation, AI-powered photo editing and even writing code. In many cases, it can work in the background to offer proactive suggestions based on what you’re doing on your device.

On Wear OS, Gemini still processes requests via the cloud, so it needs a stable internet connection whether that’s through your phone, Wi-Fi or LTE. If you’re offline, you won’t be able to use it. The goal here is to free you up from having to pull out your phone and do more from just your wrist.

Gemini will debut on the new Galaxy Watches, with the broader rollout to other devices coming in the next few weeks via automatic update for any Android smartwatch running Wear OS 4 or later, as long as it’s paired with a phone that’s running Gemini AI.

Read more about the new Galaxy Watch 8 Series and what to expect in the latest Wear OS 6 updates.