Gemini 3.6 Flash
The broadest input coverage of any current model, and the practical choice when your source material is not just text.
The facts at a glance
Pricing last checked August 7, 2026. Prices change and vary by region. Check the official pricing page ↗
Assessment
What it does well
- Accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF as input, which no rival matches as cleanly
- Google reports it uses 17 percent fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Index while improving coding and multimodal results
- Computer use is built in as a client side tool
- A genuine free API tier
Where it falls short
- A Flash tier workhorse, not a frontier reasoning model
- Maximum output of 64,000 tokens is half that of the OpenAI and Anthropic flagships
- Google has confirmed Gemini 3.5 Pro is still in testing and Gemini 4 is only in pre training, so the Pro tier has not moved in some time
Privacy and data control
Google states that with the Keep Activity setting on, chats are used to train generative AI models, and turning it off stops future chats being used. Even with it off, chats are still processed for safety and security, including by human reviewers.
The longer read
What multimodal actually buys you
Most models described as multimodal accept text and images. Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts video, audio, and PDF as first class inputs too. If your work starts with a recorded meeting, a scanned document, or a screen recording, that difference removes an entire preprocessing step rather than saving you a few tokens.
How it performs by outcome
We assess products against a job, not a leaderboard. These are the outcomes this entry is compared under.
Worth comparing against
How this profile was produced
Source review. Every fact here is drawn from the provider documentation linked below and checked on the date shown. We have not yet run this entry through a controlled test, and no scoring is implied.
Read the full review methodology →