Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
---

Title: Project Astra, Google's vision for a universal AI assistant, is
pulling into focus

Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 17:45:30 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/project-astra-goo...

Last year at Google I/O, one of the most interesting demos was Project Astra,
an early version of a multimodal AI that could recognize your surroundings in
real-time and answer questions about them conversationally. While the demo
offered a glimpse into Google's plans for more powerful AI assistants, the
company was careful to note that what we saw was a "research preview."

One year later though, Google is laying out its vision for Project Astra to
one day power a version of Gemini that can act as a "universal AI assistant."
And Project Astra has gotten some important upgrades to help the company
accomplish this. Google has been working on upgrading Astra's memory ΓÇö the
version we saw last year could only "remember" for 30 seconds at a time ΓÇö
and added computer control so Astra can now take on more complex tasks.

In its latest video showcasing Astra, Google shows the assistant browsing the
web and pulling out specific pieces of information necessary to complete a
task (in this example, fixing a mountain bike). Astra is also able to look
through past emails to find specific specs of the bike in question and call a
local bike shop to inquire about a replacement part.

Eventually, according to DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, Astra's advancements will
show up in Gemini. "Our ultimate vision is to transform the Gemini app into a
universal AI assistant that will perform everyday tasks for us, take care of
our mundane admin, surface delightful new recommendations, making us more
productive and enriching our lives," Hassabis writes in a blog post. "This
starts with the capabilities we first explored last year in our research
prototype Project Astra, such as video understanding, screen sharing and
memory."

Some of that work is already evident in Gemini Live, which recently got some
multimodal capabilities of its own. But, as I noted last year, Project Astra
gets even more interesting in the context of smart glasses ΓÇö an idea Google
briefly teased in its I/O video last year. That vision appears to be inching
closer to reality, with Hassabis noting that Google is working on bringing
Project Astra abilities to "new form factors, like glasses." There's no clear
timeframe on when any of this will be available, but given Google's updates
on Android XR elsewhere at I/O, we know the company has big plans for AI-
powered smart glasses later this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/project-astra-goo...
assistant-is-pulling-into-focus-174539875.html?src=rss

---
VRSS v2.1.180528