Google Pay Gets a Gemini-Powered Chatbot for Spending Insights in India
Last Updated: 2026-07-29 17:56:09
Google Pay is adding a conversational AI layer to how Indian users track their money. In a blog post published Wednesday, Google announced Ask Google Pay, a chatbot built on its Gemini models, alongside a new co-branded credit card with the State Bank of India.
What Ask Google Pay actually does
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Ask Google Pay is an opt-in feature, requiring users to first turn on Personalisation within the app before it becomes available. Once active, it lets users have a conversation with Google Pay about their own spending rather than digging through transaction lists manually.
Ask it to break down last month’s spending, for instance, and the chatbot pulls the relevant data, presents it as a pie chart, sorts transactions into categories, surfaces observations about spending patterns, and offers suggestions for where to cut back. Google says the tool can go further too, surfacing tailored offers, suggesting credit card options based on a user’s habits, and explaining financial concepts in plain language, things like how compounding interest works, how different tax regimes compare, what a SIP actually is, or how credit scores are calculated.
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To generate these answers, Google says the chatbot draws on a user’s transaction history and credit report data, which is what allows the recommendations to feel personalised rather than generic. The feature supports both text and voice input, and Google says it works across 10 Indian languages.
A new credit card, built with SBI
Alongside the chatbot, Google also announced the Google Pay Flex SBI Card, a co-branded credit card built with the State Bank of India. This expands Google’s existing digital credit card push in India, which began in December 2025 with the Google Pay Flex Axis Card.
Worth correcting one detail here: while the Axis card runs solely on the RuPay network, the new SBI card is reportedly issued across both RuPay and Visa networks, giving it broader acceptance than its predecessor. Like the Axis version, it’s fully digital, issued directly through the Google Pay app, and designed to work for both online purchases and in-person UPI-based payments.
This push fits into a much bigger opportunity. India has more than 1.4 billion people, yet fewer than 50 million currently hold a credit card, a gap that’s pushed both tech platforms and banks to look at embedding credit directly into apps people already use daily for payments. Google Pay’s own user base in India runs into the hundreds of millions, giving it a genuinely large audience to introduce credit products to at scale.
For SBI specifically, the timing lines up with a strong quarter. SBI Cards reported a 20 percent year-on-year rise in standalone net profit to Rs 664 crore in Q1 FY27, with total credit card spending up 27 percent to Rs 1,18,475 crore, momentum the bank appears keen to build on by tapping into Google Pay’s existing digital reach rather than relying solely on traditional card acquisition channels.