Vietnam leads region in using AI in academia

On July 14, Google announced that the number of active users on the Gemini app in Southeast Asia has more than doubled in a year. According to its first-ever Gemini Report: Southeast Asia 2026, the region has also adopted Gemini faster than any other Google application. It has also come up as the first most searched-for AI assistant in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand.

The report analyses usage trends across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam to uncover new insights into how people across the region are adopting Gemini to work, create, and navigate their daily lives in the region. This builds on the 900 million monthly active users of the app globally, with this rapid growth driven by Southeast Asia’s young, tech-savvy population, with nearly 40 per cent under 25 years old, and Gemini’s strong performance in local languages.

The report dives deeper into how people across the region are adopting Gemini. Youths are the power users. Younger digital natives are leading Gemini app adoption in Southeast Asia. They make more requests, engage in longer conversations with Gemini and write significantly more detailed prompts than other age groups.

Strong in local languages: Gemini’s success in the region comes down to local fluency. Nearly 70 per cent of prompts in the region are submitted in native languages, led by Vietnam (89 per cent), Thailand (87 per cent), and Indonesia (84 per cent). According to the Southeast Asia Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (SEA-HELM) by leading AI think-tank, AI Singapore, Gemini is the overall best-performing large language model (LLM) for Southeast Asian languages.

“AI adoption happens when technology feels native, not translated. In a region as linguistically rich as Southeast Asia, models must understand local context deeply to be used effectively. Gemini’s strong standing on our SEA-HELM evaluation framework demonstrates its ability to navigate the complex linguistic realities of the region. These results underscore why rigorous evaluation and continued development of multilingual AI remain important for advancing AI adoption across Southeast Asia,” said Leslie Teo, senior director of AI Products, AI Singapore.

The report also highlights changing user behaviour. Almost three-quarters of Gemini requests in Southeast Asia are made from mobile devices, while users are increasingly interacting through voice, images and video rather than typing. More than 40 per cent of prompts now include voice commands, photos or video uploads, and over 10 per cent rely exclusively on voice input. Google said these multimodal capabilities are enabling users to complete everyday tasks such as translating street signs, analysing documents and troubleshooting household problems in real time through features including Gemini Live.

Content creation is another major use case. Around 40 per cent of queries ask Gemini to generate original outputs, including written documents, images, music and videos. According to Google, users across Southeast Asia have generated more than five billion images with Nano Banana, the company’s image generation model, over the past year. Since the introduction of Lyria 3 in the region, users have also created nearly one million AI-generated songs.

Vietnam stands out both for its use of the Vietnamese language and for education-related applications. The report found that 89 per cent of prompts submitted by Vietnamese users are written in Vietnamese, the highest proportion in Southeast Asia. Translation and localisation are also among the country’s most common use cases, reflecting demand for tools that support communication with international markets.

Education has emerged as one of Gemini’s strongest applications in Vietnam. Academic-related queries account for 17 per cent of all prompts from the country, the highest share in Southeast Asia. Google said more than 160,000 students use the Gemini Canvas Exam Preparation tool each month, while educators generate around 55,000 teaching-related requests every day.

Vietnam is also among the region’s leading markets for coding and mathematical reasoning tasks. Nearly one-third of Gemini interactions in the country take place on desktop computers, indicating comparatively high usage for software development, technical work and other professional applications.

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