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During the company’s annual developer conference, I was waiting for my turn to join the demo zone and test Google’s voice-operated AI assistant, Project Astra. About ten minutes in, Google co-founder Sergey Brin entered the booth and left. Brin visited the presentation two times, and both times I pondered what was going through his head when he saw the demonstration of Project Astra, a multimodal AI agent intended to assist you in daily life.
Project Astra was, in my opinion, the most exciting feature of this year’s Google I/O. I had a quick encounter with Project Astra during the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, and I could see the potential of the AI assistant prototype being discussed on all platforms by Google.
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, characterises Astra as “a universal agent helpful in everyday life.” Imagine a super-charged version of Google Assistant that had the image recognition powers of Google Lens together with the intelligence of Gemini baked right in. Project Astra is precisely this. Put simply, Astra is an enhanced Gemini Ultra model that serves as a “multimodal” AI helper. It is “multimodal” in that it can provide data in all those media since it has been trained on text, photos, audio, and video. With the use of the device’s camera, it can comprehend your surroundings and answer to your questions and follow-up inquiries by capturing voice, video, and photo input.
A highly restricted demo zone was made available to four journalists at a time by Google, and I was one of the lucky few who got to see Astra up close for the first time during Google I/O. Upon entering the demonstration area, which had a large screen adorned with a camera, two researchers from DeepMind’s Project Astra team provided us with an overview of the functioning of the voice-activated assistant. Four styles were demonstrated to us: Alliteration, Free-Form, Pictionary, and Storyteller. As Google had promised in a pre-recorded demonstration at the keynote, I experimented with several modes to see how accurate Astra was in its replies and whether it could carry on a conversation like a person.
The Google team set up some plush toys in front of the camera for the experiment, where the assistant could record the speaker’s words and use the items to construct a narrative. The AI assistant then carried on with the tale, adding new details to the situations that Gemini had constructed, as one of the Google team members moved another object in front of the camera. It was enchanted because that one extra item entered the narrative as a new character.
The Pictionary mode was my next choice. It was intended to demonstrate the assistant’s skill in deciphering sketches and identifying the subject being portrayed. No matter how bad your drawing abilities were, Gemini could accurately recognise what was drawn and label the thing.
What struck me most after experimenting with various settings was how engaging and natural the assistant’s interactions were, which is something I never encountered with Google Assistant or Siri. More significantly, Astra’s abilities surpass those of current AI helpers. According to the Google researchers, Astra employs “memory” that is built-in, so even after it has scanned the objects, it can still “remember” where particular things are located. Although Astra’s memory is now restricted to a small window, the possibilities are virtually limitless should it grow in the future. It would be really crazy if the AI assistant could recall where I put my phone on the table before turning in for the night.
Google’s Project Astra essentially uses cameras to evaluate your environment and deliver information about what you are looking at, just like AI gadgets like Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin, and Meta’s Ray-Ban spectacles. But these gadgets also lack functionality, and their reaction times are usually sluggish. But I wasn’t expecting Astra to feel that nimble and speedy throughout the demo. The case for an app for the Rabbit R1 is made by Google’s Project Astra.
However, I already have an idea that Google will figure out a method to add Astra to a different kind of wearable in the future. In fact, Google has previously hinted at the existence of an AI assistant that wears glasses. If Google continues to improve Project Astra, the possibilities are truly limitless. Perhaps Google Glass will return, but with an AI twist this time.
Although Project Astra is still just in “research preview,” Google has already announced intentions to integrate some of the sophisticated AI Assistant’s features into other products, such as the Gemini app, later this year.
The most important lesson I learned from Project Astra is that, by overlaying images and audio, we are progressing towards more sophisticated iterations of Gemini AI chatbots and ChatGPT. Project Astra is centred on the idea of real-time, camera-based AI that recognises an item to fabricate a tale, regardless of how it is pitched. Nevertheless, none of Astra’s talents allow it to behave or sound human. After all, AI chatbots, which depend on language-centric AI models, learn from vast amounts of online data, but people engage with the real world in a different way.
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