Our March version of this page treated Gemini in Chrome and its agent as one thing, because Google sells them under one name. For a buyer they’ve come apart. The assistant is free to anyone signed in to Chrome on a Mac, a Windows PC or a Chromebook Plus, wherever Google offers it. Auto browse, the part that clicks and types for you, is a paid feature for US subscribers, so it gets its own comparison and this page sticks to the assistant.
What the free assistant is good at
Gemini sits in a side panel and answers questions about the page you’re on, or about as many as 10 open tabs at once. The multi-tab part is the one we’d miss, because comparing four pricing pages that each hide the one detail you care about in a different place is exactly the squinting nobody wants to do. It’s hooked into Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Maps and Google Flights, it can edit an image in place with Nano Banana, and since April 14 it has had Skills: prompts you save and rerun with a slash on any page or across a set of tabs, synced to your other desktop Chromes. Skills seem underrated to us, maybe because they hide behind a slash.
Google has been widening the map all year. Canada, India and New Zealand came in March, more of Asia-Pacific in April, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East in June, the UK on July 14, and Chrome for Android in the US on August 18.
Where it stops
At the form. Gemini can tell you which of three quotes is cheapest once shipping is added, but entering the winner into your purchasing system is auto browse’s job, and auto browse means Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month (or Ultra), a US address and an English-language device.
That’s the gap dassi was built for. An office manager who copies each morning’s new orders out of a supplier portal and into a Google Sheet, in Edge because that’s what IT installed, has no Gemini in her browser at all. dassi would learn that job from one plain-English description, or from watching her do it once, and save it as a workflow she reruns on demand or on a schedule (her browser has to be open when a scheduled run is due). She could pick the model too, including Gemini on her own Google key.
Logging in
Gemini’s assistant reads whatever tab you share with it, signed-in pages included, and gets at your Google apps through your Google account, but it won’t sign in to other sites for you; that’s auto browse again, which can use Google Password Manager after asking, and Google says the password manager “does not share your passwords with Gemini in Chrome.” dassi works in the sessions your browser already has, and when one has lapsed it signs in with whatever the browser’s password manager autofills, so the password never goes into a chat or into dassi’s settings. You type the 2FA code, and it stops before any action you’ve flagged.
When to choose Gemini in Chrome
You use Chrome, you mostly want help reading and comparing, and your days run through Gmail and Calendar. It costs nothing and it’s already installed. Start there.
When to choose dassi
When the work is typing into websites rather than reading them, or when your browser is Edge or Brave. It’s $10 a month with your own key, or $25 to $300 a month on a plan with credits, and the instructions and page content it needs go to the provider you chose, through dassi’s relay if you use included credits.
Both panels fit in one Chrome window, for what it’s worth, and neither asks you to close the other.