Summary
- Gemini is gaining a new “Answer now” option to deliver faster answers.
- “Answer now” skips in-depth thinking on the Thinking and Pro models.
- The feature is rolling out now for free and paid accounts on Android, iOS, and the web.
Google’s Gemini is probably my most-used AI assistant, but there’s no denying it sometimes takes a minute to get an answer to what seems like a simple question. A new update from Google aims to help reduce this friction by letting you skip “in-depth” thinking on certain models.
Gemini’s models explained
You’ve got options
Gemini 3 offers a choice of three models: Fast, Thinking, and Pro.
- Fast: As the name suggests, this model is the quickest. It’s meant for simple, everyday tasks.
- Thinking: This model uses the same base as Fast, but with some additional reasoning enabled. It’s slower, but it’s better at working through complex queries.
- Pro: Pro is the most powerful Gemini model, but also the slowest. It facilitates deeper thinking and reasoning, making it best suited for queries involving topics such as coding, advanced math, or in-depth research.
The choice of models is great. The problem is that sometimes you forget to switch models — or just don’t want to. In these instances, Gemini can end up taking forever to deliver an answer to a simple question, like “What’s the capital of New Zealand?”.
How the new “Answer now” button helps
Faster answers without compromising quality?
Google’s newest Gemini feature aims to help solve these problems by letting you skip the in-depth thinking on a question. While Gemini thinks, it will display what it’s thinking about. Next to this information, you’ll find a button that says Answer now. Tapping this button will skip the more advanced reasoning steps and deliver your answer more quickly, saving valuable time on queries that don’t require much detailed thinking. You can also use Gemini Live to save even more time, or use the Android share sheet to send inputs directly to Gemini.
Crucially, “Answer now” speeds things up without changing models. This is in contrast to an older “Skip” button that would simply switch to the Fast model. In theory, this should help prevent a loss of answer quality by switching to the more basic model, although time will tell if that actually pans out. Meanwhile, if you want better answers from Gemini, you can try using better prompts.
That said, you do lose something by using “Answer now”: the ability to show the “thought process” used by the model to determine its answer. Normally, when you use Thinking or Pro for a query, you’ll get a “Show thinking” drop-down that will outline the steps the model took to arrive at its answer. This option is gone when you hit “Answer now,” presumably because Gemini isn’t going through those same steps.
The new feature is rolling out now to Gemini users on Android, iOS, and the web. It’s available to both free and paid accounts.
Oddly enough, the feature is still called “Skip” on iOS, though the underlying functionality appears to be the same.
