Google expands the Gemini API so conversational agents can be more fluid and practical. Now you can combine built-in tools like Google Search and Google Maps with your custom functions in a single request, let context flow between tool calls, and take advantage of Grounding with Google Maps for the Gemini 3 family.
What changes and why it matters
Before, you had to orchestrate manually when to call a built-in tool and when to invoke your own function. That made agents more complex and increased latency. With this update you can pass both built-in and custom tools in the same interaction, letting Gemini pivot without extra steps: for example, search public info and then call your backend in a single flow.
What do you get from that? Less architectural complexity, lower end-to-end latency, and a more direct path to building agents that actually solve real tasks.
Context that flows between tools
In multi-step flows, the output of one tool is often the input of another. The new context circulation preserves each tool call and its response inside the model’s context, so later steps can reason about that information.
