Adios, Gems: Google's new Gemini skills won't be paywalled

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Gemini Skills are the new Gems, and they're not just for paid Gemini users anymore. One of the easiest ways to create your own, customized Gemini chatbot is about to be retired, but we just got a pair of encouraging updates about their replacements. We learned earlier this week that skills, a Gemini feature that was previously reserved for the Gemini Spark AI assistant, would step in for Gems, and that existing Gems would be converted to skills in the runup to the November sunset date. One of the big questions about skills, which are essentially custom instructions for Gemini that can be summoned within a prompt, was whether they'd be available to free as well as paid users.