Attention, cash-strapped college students: Google is now offering one free year of its AI Pro plan, normally $19.99 per month, to those attending college in the US.
Meanwhile, in most places outside the States, it’s providing one year of free AI Plus, normally $4.99 a month, to college students. The latter offer is good everywhere Google offers AI Plus—the list spans more than 160 markets—but not Albania, Bolivia, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, or Tunisia.
Click here to sign up for the offer. After 12 months, students who don’t cancel will be charged the full price of their plan. The two plans are the lower tiers of Google’s AI offerings:
- AI Plus includes 400GB of online storage for Google services, twice the usage limit of non-paying users__,__and access to theGemini Live conversational feature, among other upgrades. - AI Pro includes 5GB of Google storage and four times the usage limits of free users. It adds higher-end tools such as the
Gemini Spark assistant. Google is also offering an “up to 70% discount” on a bundle of AI Pro and YouTube Premium; in the US, that brings the monthly rate down to $8.99, down from $35.98.
Google’s back-to-school announcement also includes a set of expanded study tools, starting with practice quizzes already available in AI Overview and AI Mode search. In the latter AI search option, you can also generate search notebooks from course materials and your AI Mode conversations, and request interactive visualizations of tricky concepts; those two features will also soon be available in AI Overview results.
In what Google describes as “the coming days,” you’ll be able to search Gemini Notebooks (formerly NotebookLM) you’ve created for particular courses or topics in AI Mode. In “the coming weeks,” you’ll be able to request step-by-step tutorials via the Google Lens feature in the company’s eponymous Android and iOS apps.
Finally, the company touts the ability to use Gemini Live to launch “Deep Research” in the background, then quiz the chatbot on the resulting reports. Videos in an advance copy of Google’s press kit show the AI generating a report with a typo in its title: “Classical Music in Vienna and it’s Historical Influence.” Consider this yet another reminder to verify AI answers rather than assume they’re true.