Google’s first-ever Gemini Report: Southeast Asia 2026, released on July 14 alongside the local-language rollout of its new “Gemini Spark” agent, claims the chatbot has become the fastest-adopted Google product the region has ever seen – active users more than doubled between April 2025 and March 2026, outpacing the growth curve of Search, Maps or Chrome in their own early days.
The useful signal for travel is this: South-east Asia is not adopting AI the way Silicon Valley assumed it would. It’s mobile-first, voice-heavy, and stubbornly local-language. For an industry whose entire customer journey – search, book, complain, rebook – increasingly runs through conversational interfaces, this is a key point to consider.
By the numbers
Gemini has passed 900 million monthly active users globally as of April 2026, spread across 230 countries.
- South-east Asia’s user base more than doubled in a year, making the region one of Gemini’s fastest-growing markets worldwide.
- Nearly 40% of the region’s population is under 25, and it’s this cohort driving adoption – more requests, longer conversations, more detailed prompts than any other age group.
- Singapore has the highest per-capita Gemini adoption of any country in the world.
Local language is the real headline
The number that should interest travel marketers is this: nearly 70% of prompts across the region come in local languages, not English. Vietnam leads at 89%, Thailand at 87%, Indonesia at 84%. Gemini also topped AI Singapore’s SEA-HELM benchmark as the best-performing large language model across seven South-east Asian languages, including Burmese, Filipino, Malay, Tamil, Thai and Vietnamese.
Malaysia and the Philippines sit at the more English-fluent end of the spectrum – useful shorthand for anyone building AI-assisted service layers and wondering where a single-language deployment might work, and where it won’t.
Mobile, voice, and increasingly not typed at all
Three-quarters of Gemini requests in South-east Asia come from mobile devices, against a global mix that’s far more desktop-weighted. More than 40% of prompts now involve voice, images or video rather than text, and voice-only interactions account for over 10% of all prompts. In Indonesia, that figure climbs past 74% mobile share of multimodal use – people are talking to their phones the way earlier generations picked up a landline.
This point is worth nothing for distribution and customer service teams.
What people actually use it for
Google frames usage across three buckets: Gemini as generative collaborator (around 40% of prompts – writing, images, music, video), as research assistant (about 20% – summarising documents, structuring data), and as thought partner for two-way brainstorming (roughly 10%).
The report leans hard into individual vignettes – a Manila micro-influencer scripting content between coffee shop visits, a Bangkok marketing executive planning meals on her commute, a Hanoi tea farmer using Gemini to sound more professional in English-language buyer emails –the planner, the researcher, the on-the-go professional, the small operator trying to punch above their size.
Each country profile carries its own texture. The Philippines is the only market in the region where prompt volume skews female, and it leads South-east Asia in multimodal and creative use. Thailand shows the highest share of lifestyle and creativity prompts. Vietnam’s users lean hardest into translation. Singapore, unsurprisingly, is the most productivity-driven market, with the highest share of coding and professional prompts in the region.
The ambition – “the most helpful AI assistant”
The report doubles as launch collateral for Gemini Spark, Google’s new “always-on” AI agent, now rolling out in South-east Asian languages to Gemini Advanced subscribers – which promises to move from answering questions to completing tasks across Gmail, Docs and Slides even when a device is locked. Google is explicit about the ambition: make Gemini “the most helpful AI assistant for the 600 million people across South-east Asia”, then hand it agentic capability to act on their behalf.
That has implications worth watching for travel. This region, which has proven very willing to talk to an AI in its own language, on its own phone, about everything from travel plans to birthday gift ideas, is now being offered an AI that can go and do those things – book the table, draft the itinerary, chase the refund.
This is a preview of who – or what – travellers will be delegating to next.
Source: Google, “Gemini Report: Southeast Asia 2026,” published July 14, 2026. Download the full report here)
