Google DeepMind has announced Genie 4, the next version of its world model, which generates an explorable world in real time as you move through it. The DeepMind post and Google’s announcement focus on two new abilities: sound, and steering with words.
Sound and talking characters
Genie 4 is “natively multimodal”. Each world generates audio as it goes, “including ambient sounds, music, and interactive dialogue”. Google calls speech “the true frontier”: characters “converse and react to your inputs or events in the world, all in real-time”.
Steering a world while it runs
You can change a scene mid-session with natural language, for example “moving the camera, changing the weather, or introducing new characters”. Under the hood, Google says, Gemini Omni anchors the look and behaviour of the world, while Gemini 3.8 Flash acts as “a guiding agent in the loop”: it watches the scene, breaks a goal into steps and checks each new frame to see whether a step worked.
DeepMind also shows a robotics experiment: Gemini 4 Argon breaks a task into steps that Genie 4 renders, in a demo of Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid playing checkers. That is a simulation for planning research, not a robot product.
Who can use it
Not most people, yet. Genie 4 is “a research preview for trusted testers”. Google says it is “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie and to early-access partners in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, with a waitlist. There are no dates or prices.
All video and audio Genie 4 generates will carry SynthID watermarks. Google lists the limits plainly: details and object permanence can “shift or drift over time”, and complex physics, audio accuracy, legible text, spatial accuracy and long-term consistency are still open problems.
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