Google expands Gemini in Chrome to India

Google announced it is rolling out Gemini integration for Chrome, including India, Canada, and New Zealand, to let users access the AI via a desktop sidebar and query page content and connected Google apps, the company said.

The company said the update adds support for eight Indian languages in addition to English: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.

Google first introduced Gemini in Chrome in the US via a floating window last September and added sidebar tools earlier this year.

Users with access will see an Ask Gemini icon on the tab bar that can summarize pages, answer questions, or create a quiz to understand a topic, Google said. Google said Gemini can also work across tabs.

Google said Gemini can connect to Gmail, Maps, Calendar, and YouTube to draft emails, summarize videos with timestamps, and schedule meetings from the sidebar.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Behind the rollout lies a story of security flaws and product scrutiny

The Gemini Live side panel in Chrome previously had a high-severity vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-0628, which could have let malicious Chrome extensions with basic permissions take over the tool 1.
Such access could have opened a path to a user’s camera, microphone, or local files, raising the stakes for a privileged AI assistant inside the browser 2.
Google is also expanding Gemini in India, where products like Maps have drawn scrutiny 3.
In Uttar Pradesh, three men died after following a Google Maps route that went off an unfinished bridge. Police reportedly charged a Google employee, and the incident intensified attention on safety and localization features such as accurate routing and language support 3, 4.

Google’s AI push reveals hidden dangers in existing tech

Adding AI assistants can raise security risk by widening the “attack surface” (the number of ways a system can be targeted) and weakening security models that keep parts of a program separated 1.
In Chrome, the flaw let a low-privilege extension steer a high-privilege browser component, which enabled privilege escalation (gaining higher access than intended) 5.
Similar knock-on effects can appear outside the browser.
When Gemini was enabled on Google Cloud projects, some publicly exposed Google API keys could be abused to authenticate to the Gemini API. That created risk for billing abuse plus possible exposure of data accessible through that API 6.