Gemini now supports file uploads

The paid version of Gemini – Gemini Advanced – currently allows uploading files to perform data analysis. You can upload some files on Gemini Advanced and ask questions from the document.

The best thing is that you can send multiple files of different formats to Gemini at the same time and ask questions related to them. The article tested Gemini's file upload feature and compared it with ChatGPT. Here are the results!

What file types are supported on Gemini Advanced?

You can upload different file types such as PDF, CSV, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, TXT, DOTX, RTF and TSV on Gemini. This basically means you can upload PDF files, Office files like Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, etc. There is also support for JPG, JPEG, image files. PNG and WEBP, but these files are also available on the free version of Gemini.

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Furthermore, you can connect your Google Drive through Gemini Extensions and upload to Sheets and Docs.

However, compared to ChatGPT, file support is limited on Gemini. ChatGPT can process any type of file you provide to the chatbot. From ZIP files to encoding languages such as JSON, PY, XML; data files such as SQL and MATLAB; Audio files such as WAV and several other file formats are supported by ChatGPT.

Furthermore, OpenAI offers free file uploads to all ChatGPT users, but with message limits. On the contrary, you will need to register for Gemini Advanced to be able to upload files, which is definitely a drawback. However, let's take a look at Gemini Advanced's file handling capabilities and see how well it performs compared to ChatGPT.

How to upload files Gemini Advanced

Go ahead and open gemini.google.com in your browser.
Make sure you're signed up for Gemini Advanced.
Click the '+' button at the bottom and then click 'Upload files'.

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Then, upload the file locally. The author of the article uploaded a large CSV file containing data on the number of Internet users worldwide from 1990 to 2020.
Next, the author asked a simple question from the uploaded CSV file and Gemini did very well even though the file had over 6,000 rows. ChatGPT also had an immediate answer when asking the same question. Both models use Python internally to perform data analysis.

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Next, ask both models to create a histogram and exact results. Both Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT deliver the same results.

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Finally, the author uploaded an XLSX spreadsheet containing data on Chromebooks and their specifications. The author asked both models to find the best Chromebook based on specifications. Gemini recommends the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook due to its superior display, and ChatGPT recommends the Lenovo Flex 5 because it offers a better value. Both answers are impressive.

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Overall, for data processing, both Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT are excellent, supported by the Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o models respectively. No signs of hallucination were observed, most likely because both models used Python for data analysis. Google really improved its Gemini 1.5 Pro model after Google I/O and it's very consistent now.

The only downside to Gemini Advanced is that free users cannot upload files and file compatibility is also limited. In comparison, ChatGPT offers file uploading to all users, albeit with limitations, and has support for many file formats.

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