Google's new project Astra represents future of AI-powered assistants

By Davey Alba and Julia Love

Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Tuesday showed off Project Astra, an aspirational AI agent that the company says represents the future of artificial intelligence-powered assistants: AI that can react to the world like people do, remembering what it “sees” and “hears” in order to answer questions about the scene around it.
 

During its annual I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, Google demonstrated how such an agent might work.

A prerecorded video showed an employee walking through the office as the AI assistant used the phone’s camera to “see,” responding to questions about what was in the scene. The program correctly answered a question about which London neighborhood the office was located in, based on the view from the window, and also told the employee where she had left her glasses.

According to Google, some features of Project Astra could come to Gemini, the company’s powerful AI model, toward the later half of this year. 

EVERYTHING GOOGLE
 

Circle to Search: Circle to Search lets Android smartphone users search anything on their phone without switching to another app 
 

Gemini Assistant: Google plans to let users bring Gemini on top of the apps (overlay) with support for actions like drag and drop generated images into Gmail and other places 
 

Gemini Nano with multimodality: Model to help differently abled people via the TalkBack feature that will offer  clearer descriptions of an image
 

Scam call alerts: Gemini Nano with Multimodality on Android will work to screen the calls and notify users with an alert for suspected scams during phone calls

 

Custom Gemini AI model
 

Expanded AI overviews: Google is bringing Search Generative Experience (SGE) feature to Search. Like in the SGE, the AI overviews will offer a quick overview of a topic. Support for multi-step reasoning capability will allow users to ask complex question , with all the nuances and caveats, in one go
 

Meal and trip planning: Search will double up as a planner to help figure out a meal plan and to lay down a trip schedule

AI-organised search results: Its generative AI, powered by custom Gemini, will think and problem-solve  and curate an AI-customised page with extensive results under 
 

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Search with videos: Google Search will soon get a new capability to allow searching with video