Google built a low-cost, high-throughput pipeline for developers working with media, combining Gemini’s fastest image model yet with a similarly speedy multimodal model that can turn images into video with synchronized sound.
What's new: Google released Nano Banana 2 Lite (formally Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image), the company’s fastest and lowest-cost image model, intended as a replacement for the original Nano Banana. The company also made its latest video model, Gemini Omni Flash, available to developers through its API platforms, six weeks after it first reached consumers via Google apps. Google's announcement bills the pair as a potential double feature, allowing users to generate an inexpensive still image (or a hundred) with the image model, then turn the best one into video through the same conversational interface.
- Input/output: Nano Banana 2 Lite – text and image input to image (1k max resolution) and text output. Gemini Omni Flash – text, image, and video input to 720p video with synchronized audio output, up to 10 seconds per clip
- Availability: Both models are available through the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, plus the Gemini app and Google Flow. Nano Banana 2 Lite also available via AI Mode in Search, NotebookLM, Google Photos, Stitch, and Google Ads; Gemini Omni Flash also via YouTube Shorts
- Price: Nano Banana 2 Lite $0.034 per 1K-resolution image; Gemini Omni Flash $0.10 per second of 720p video
- Performance: Nano Banana 2 Lite – fifth place in Elo on Image Arena; Gemini Omni Flash – first in Elo for video generation on Video Arena (second for editing)
- Speed: Nano Banana 2 Lite generates an image in about four seconds; Gemini Omni Flash generation times undisclosed
- Undisclosed: Parameter counts and training data for both models
How it works: Google published a model card for each release, giving the base architecture and known limits but withholding parameter counts and training-data specifics.
- Nano Banana 2 Lite is a multimodal transformer trained on text and images that runs on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Google's cost-efficient multimodal base mode. Gemini Omni Flash is a multimodal transformer trained on text, image, audio, and video.
- Gemini Omni Flash returns a 720p clip with native audio from a text prompt, a starting image, or reference images. Its editing is conversational: when processed through Google’s Interactions API, the model keeps session history so each instruction revises the prior clip rather than regenerating it, for up to three sequential edits.
- The image-to-video mode is how the two work together: through the same Gemini API (or conversationally in the Google AI Studio web interface), a Nano Banana 2 Lite image can be passed to Gemini Omni Flash as a starting frame.
Performance: Google reports favorable human-rater results for both models, and both place near the top of Arena.ai's crowd-voted boards. Most of Google's figures come from its own comparisons on internal benchmarks, so independent confirmation is still limited.
- On text-to-image, Nano Banana 2 Lite ranks fifth on Arena.ai's crowd-voted board at 1,250 Elo, edging out the pricier Nano Banana Pro (1,245 Elo) despite costing 10 cents less per 1k image; OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 leads the board at 1,386 Elo.
- On video, Gemini Omni Flash leads generation at 1,527 Elo and ranks second on the video-edit board at 1,347 Elo, just behind ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 (1,377 Elo).
- In Google's own human-rater comparisons, Gemini Omni Flash took first for overall preference and instruction-following on video editing (504 examples) and on Meta's public MovieGenBench (1,003 prompts), and tied for first with Grok-Imagine-Video and Kling on VBench I2V (355 image-text pairs).
Behind the news: Google’s popular "Nano Banana" moniker began as a placeholder codename before the original model, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, went live in August 2025. Google has extended the family with qualifiers since — Nano Banana Pro in November 2025, Nano Banana 2 in February 2026 — and now Nano Banana 2 Lite. Gemini Omni Flash first appeared at Google I/O on May 19, available only to Gemini app subscribers, Google Flow, and on YouTube Shorts.
Why it matters: Media generation is now cheap and fast enough to run inside an app at runtime, rather than as a slow, curated production step, marking a shift in its unit economics. Ten-second clips can be chained into longer pieces, and developers can now automate those generations directly within their own apps. Among other use cases, this meets the needs of high-volume digital advertisers and social media producers. Meta, for example, is reportedly building a system to generate ad creative, including video, from a product image and a budget.
We're thinking: It’s a mistake to treat image and video generation as just one market. Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash aren’t high-resolution enough to work for Hollywood, and their speed and cost improvements might not add up to much to hobbyist users. But just as we’ve seen with text and audio, there’s more value to unlock with multimedia by adding automation, interaction, personalization, and agentic workflows. This is a good time to unleash your imagination!