Google announced a lot of things last night during the Google I/O Keynote. AI took centre stage during the event, as we all expected. A lot of announcements were made, but one thing that I found the most interesting was Google’s Project Astra. It is still a work in progress right now, but in the future, Google hopes that it will become a universal assistant. When I first saw it, it reminded me of Jarvis from Iron Man. Let’s take a look at what Project Astra is and what the search engine giant’s plans for it.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind presented Project Astra at Google I/O. He showed us the capabilities that Project Astra holds via a prerecorded video.
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So in simple terms, Project Astra can be the future of AI assistants. They showcased a video during the event, which was an early version of a multimodal AI assistant. It works through the camera lens. It can analyse and understand objects that are kept in front of it. So you can show it anything and have real-time conversations with it. It is a lot more advanced than Gemini AI is right now. Kind of reminds me of a video that Mark Zuckerberg shared with his Rayban Meta AI glasses.
It gives responses to users based on text, audio, and video inputs. The AI assistant has perception, comprehension, location awareness, and retrieval capabilities. In the video, the assistant could identify objects laid out in front. Some also speculate that we will get an improved version of Google Lens when the assistant is finally released.
Google hopes that in the future Project Astra will become a universal assistant. Are you excited about this? Let me know in the comments.