Google is renaming two of Gemini’s best-known features. Gems — the custom assistants users build inside Gemini — are becoming “Skills”, and Spark, the background agent launched earlier this year, is moving into the main chat under the name “Task”. Android Police published a field guide to the renamed features on October 18, and Google has published its own support page setting out how Skills work and when the change lands.
The date that matters is November 17. From then, Google will begin automatically converting Gems on personal accounts into Skills. Workspace accounts follow much later: business, enterprise and non-profit accounts in March 2027, and education accounts in June 2027.
Gemini Skills: What Changes When Gems Become Skills
Gems were standalone custom bots. You picked one from the sidebar and talked to it in its own window. Skills live directly inside the main chat: you invoke one by typing “/” and its name — Google says the trigger will soon change to “@” — and Gemini can also apply a Skill on its own when it decides one fits your prompt.
The bigger upgrade is stacking. Multiple Skills can run in a single conversation, and one Skill can invoke another, so a Skill that enforces company branding and a Skill that sets writing tone can shape the same answer at once. Gems could never be combined that way.
According to Google’s support page, Skills are open to anyone over 18 signed in to a personal Google Account, and they began rolling out in the main Gemini chat worldwide from September 30. Android Police reports Skills reached Workspace on October 5 and the Gemini app on October 13.
Gemini Skills: What Carries Over, And What Does Not
Your custom instructions and knowledge files migrate automatically, and you can keep using each Gem until your account converts. After conversion, Gems are gone for good on personal accounts.
Not everything survives the move. GitHub files are not supported in Skills, and several tools Gems could call by default — Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning, and video and music generation — do not work inside Skills yet. Google says sharing a Skill by link and attaching Google Drive files and notebooks are coming.
Android Police’s advice to Gem builders is blunt: before November 17, copy each Gem’s instructions into a Markdown file and download its knowledge files, so anything the migration drops can be rebuilt by hand.
Spark Becomes Task: Gemini’s Agent Moves Into The Main Chat
Spark, the “24/7” autonomous agent Google unveiled at I/O 2026 in May, previously lived in its own separate section. It now appears as “Task” in a new Chat and Task toggle beneath the prompt box, sitting alongside Scheduled Actions, the timer feature that has been around since 2025. A new “Scheduled” page in the sidebar lists active, paused and completed tasks, and “Gemini Spark Settings” in the account menu now reads “Task settings”. Google’s help pages still call the agent Spark.
The two neighbours are not priced alike. Task requires a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription, while Scheduled Actions no longer require a subscription at all — though the rollout to free accounts is still in progress, and Keep Activity has to be switched on.
Why It Matters
The rename is really a repositioning. “Skills” is the same word rival assistants now use for reusable, stackable instruction sets, and Google is aligning Gemini’s customisation model with that agent-era pattern — the same shift visible in the four Gemini 4 Argon agents that beat Minecraft by dividing work between them, and in the research push behind Google’s Antigravity offer to 10,000 scientists. For users, the risk is practical: saved Gem workflows that lean on Canvas, Deep Research or Drive files may come out of the November migration diminished. For Google, folding Spark into chat as Task ends the experiment of a separate agent tab and puts Gemini’s autonomous features where its users already are — the same territory as Google’s Harness2 agent framework.
Background
Google introduced Gems in 2024 as custom versions of Gemini, and renamed Extensions to “apps” in 2025. The company has form here: Bard became Gemini in February 2024, and its messaging history — Talk, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Meet, Chat — is a standing joke Android Police did not resist repeating. This time, though, the new names arrive with a functional change underneath them, not just new labels.
Source: Android Police; tbreak; Google’s Gemini Skills support page, as reported by 9to5Google and Android Authority
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