Google Gemini Users Double in Southeast Asia: Philippines leads in Female AI adoption

Google's first-ever Gemini Report reveals that the number of active users of the Gemini app in the region has more than doubled in the past year.

Sapna Chadha (VP, Google SEA & South Asia Frontier) on the Big Rise of Gemini in SEA

The Philippines leads in the region in Female AI adoption

Driven by a young, mobile-first population and exceptional local language capabilities, Southeast Asia is adopting Gemini faster than any other Google Application.

While the growth spans across the entire Southeast Asian region, the Philippines stands out with unique adoption trends, workplace integration, and female empowerment in tech.

Christine Chia (Managing Director, Search and Gemini Partnerships APAC) on Gemini's innovations for SEA

The Philippines is the only country in Southeast Asia where female users lead AI adoption, logging in more prompts than male users. Filipinos are leveraging Gemini heavily for professional growth. Prompts related to job-seeking, staffing, and work-related decisions are more popular in the Philippines than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Creative processes dominate local usage, with 24 percent of Philippine prompts dedicated to creative workflows and 17 percent specifically seeking help with writing.

The same report highlights Gemini's massive footprint in the country's robust Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and marketing sectors. Filipino professionals are treating AI as a 'customer-centric teammate.' Impressively, the Philippines logs three times shares of prompts for customer support content and marketing generation than the regional average.

Beyond the Philippines, the report underscores how Gemini is natively weaving its way into the daily lives of over 600 million people across Southeast Asia. 

Nearly 40 percent of the region's population under the age of 25, digital natives are driving the highest engagement, writing the most detailed prompts, and holding longer conversations with the AI.

Samuele Saini (Director, Google Ads Solutions & Insights, Southeast Asia) on how Gemini is more than a chatbot in SEA

Nearly 70 percent of all prompts in the region are submitted in their native languages. AI Singapore's Southeast Asia Holistic Evaluation of Language Models, or SEA-HELM, evaluation benchmark officially named Gemini the best performing large language model, or LLM, for Southeast Asian Languages overall.

Almost 3 in 4 Gemini requests come from mobile devices. Users are increasingly bypassing keyboards, with 40 percent of prompts relying on voice commands, photos, and video uploads. Notably, 10 percent of users now rely entirely on features like Gemini Live.

Over the past year, Southeast Asian users generated 5 billion images using Google's Nano Banana model and nearly 1 million songs via the Lyria 3 music generation model.

Looking ahead, Google is shifting Gemini from a reactive assistant to a proactive partner with the introduction of Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal cloud-based AI agent. It is deeply integrated into the Google Workspace tools, like Gmail and Docs, and Spark operates securely in the background even when devices are locked.

Gemini Spark is currently rolling out in local Southeast Asian languages to Google AI Ultra subscribers. Additionally, users in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam can now access direct in-app shopping features, allowing them to view shoppable product listings, comparison tables, and live pricing directly within their chat threads.

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