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Gemini and other generative AI models process input and output at a granularity
called a token.
This guide explains how to get the
context windows of specific models, as well as how to
count tokens for use cases like text input, chat, multimodal
input, and system instructions and tools.
About tokens
Tokens can be single characters like z or whole words like cat. Long words
are broken up into several tokens. The set of all tokens used by the model is
called the vocabulary, and the process of splitting text into tokens is called
tokenization.
For Gemini models, a token is equivalent to about 4 characters.
100 tokens is equal to about 60-80 English words.
When billing is enabled, the cost of a call to the Gemini API is
determined in part by the number of input and output tokens, so knowing how to
count tokens can be helpful.