Google AI Studio

Google AI Studio (formerly called MakerSuite) is the browser-based tool Google provides for developers to interact with Gemini models without writing code. You can test prompts, adjust temperature and other parameters, upload images and video for multimodal testing, write system instructions, run streaming responses, and then click a button to export the configuration as ready-to-run code in Python, JavaScript, or Go. It is free to use with a Google account, with rate-limited API access that is sufficient for prototyping.

AI Studio also provides the Gemini API key management interface: when you want to move from the AI Studio playground to a real application, you generate an API key here and use it with the Gemini client SDK. The free tier includes access to all current Gemini models for prototyping, including 3.5 Flash and 3.1 Pro in preview. As of mid-2026, AI Studio also supports the Gemini Embedding models, Veo video generation, and the Managed Agents feature (letting you deploy stateful agents in Google's hosted sandbox).

For builders evaluating Google's AI stack, AI Studio is the right first stop: it is faster and lighter-weight than setting up a full Vertex AI project, and it exposes all the same models. The path to production on Google Cloud goes through Vertex AI (now the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) for enterprise governance and scale; AI Studio is for development and experimentation.