Getting Started

Getting Started with the Gemini API

Learn to integrate Google's Gemini models into your applications using the Gemini API and Google AI SDK.

What is the Gemini API?

Google's Gemini API provides access to the Gemini family of multimodal AI models. Gemini is built natively multimodal — it can understand and reason across text, images, audio, video, and code in a single model.

Why Gemini?

As covered in our [Claude vs GPT vs Gemini comparison](/blog/claude-vs-gpt-vs-gemini), Gemini stands out for:

Longest context window — Up to 1 million tokens (Gemini 1.5 Pro), enabling entire codebases or long documents in a single call
Native multimodality — Text, image, audio, video, and code understood natively
Google ecosystem — Seamless integration with Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Google Cloud
Grounding — Connect to Google Search for up-to-date factual information
Competitive pricing — Gemini 1.5 Flash offers strong performance at low cost

Available Models

Model	Context Window	Best For
gemini-1.5-pro	1,000,000 tokens	Long docs, codebases, complex reasoning
gemini-1.5-flash	1,000,000 tokens	Fast, cost-efficient tasks
gemini-2.0-flash	1,000,000 tokens	Latest, multimodal, agentic tasks
gemini-1.0-pro	32,000 tokens	Standard text generation

Getting an API Key

Go to [Google AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com)
Sign in with your Google account
Click Get API Key → Create API key
Store the key in your environment variables — never hard-code it

Two Access Paths

Google AI Studio / Google AI SDK — For direct API access, prototyping, and applications outside Google Cloud:

text

npm install @google/generative-ai

Vertex AI — For production deployments on Google Cloud with enterprise features, IAM, and VPC controls:

text

npm install @google-cloud/vertexai

Example

typescript

// Install: npm install @google/generative-ai

import { GoogleGenerativeAI } from "@google/generative-ai";

const genAI = new GoogleGenerativeAI(process.env.GEMINI_API_KEY!);

async function main() {
  const model = genAI.getGenerativeModel({ model: "gemini-1.5-flash" });

  const result = await model.generateContent(
    "Explain the difference between REST and GraphQL in 3 sentences."
  );

  console.log(result.response.text());
}

main();

Try it yourself — TYPESCRIPT