Everything announced at Google I/O 2024 including Gemini AI, Project Astra, Android 15 and more

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Everything announced at

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I/O 2024 including Gemini AI, Project Astra, Android 15 and more

At the end of I/O,

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’s annual developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View,

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CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company had said “AI” 121 times. That, essentially, was the crux of

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’s two-hour keynote — stuffing AI into every

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app and service used by more than two billion people around the world. Here are all the major updates that

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announced at the event.

Gemini 1.5 Flash and updates to Gemini 1.5 Pro

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announced a brand new AI model called Gemini 1.5 Flash, which it says is optimised for speed and efficiency. Flash sits between Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Nano, which its the company’s smallest model that runs locally on device.

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said that it created Flash because developers wanted a lighter and less expensive model than Gemini Pro to build AI-powered apps and services while keeping some of the things like a long context window of one million tokens that differentiates Gemini Pro from competing models. Later this year,

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will double Gemini’s context window to two million tokens, which means that it will be able to process two hours of video, 22 hours of audio, more than 60,000 lines of code or more than 1.4 million words at the same time.

Project Astra

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showed off Project Astra, an early version of a universal assistant powered by AI that

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’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said was

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’s version of an AI agent “that can be helpful in everyday life.”

In a video that

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says was shot in a single take, an Astra user moves around

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’s London office holding up their phone and pointing the camera at various things — a speaker, some code on a whiteboard, and out a window — and has a natural conversation with the app about what it seems. In one of the video’s most impressive moments, the correctly tells the user where she left her glasses before without the user ever having brought up the glasses.

The video ends with a twist — when the user finds and wears the missing glasses, we learn that they have an onboard camera system and are capable of using Project Astra to seamlessly carry on a conversation with the user, perhaps indicating that

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might be working on a competitor to Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses.

Ask

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Photos

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Photos was already intelligent when it came to searching for specific images or videos, but with AI,

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is taking things to the next level. If you’re a

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One subscriber in the US, you will be able to ask

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Photos a complex question like “show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited” when the feature rolls out over the next few months.

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Photos will use GPS information as well as its own judgement of what is “best” to present you with options. You can also ask

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Photos to generate captions to post the photos to social media.

Veo and Imagen 3

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’s new AI-powered media creation engines are called Veo and Imagen 3. Veo is

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’s answer to OpenAI’s Sora. It can produce “high-quality” 1080p videos that can last “beyond a minute”,

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said, and can understand cinematic concepts like a timelapse.

Imagen 3, meanwhile, is a text-to-image generator that

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claims handles text better than its previous version, Imagen 2. The result is the company’s highest quality” text-to-image model with “incredible level of detail” for “photorealistic, lifelike images” and fewer artifacts — essentially pitting it against OpenAI’s DALLE-3.

Big updates to

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Search

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is making big changes to how Search fundamentally works. Most of the updates announced today like the ability to ask really complex questions (“Find the best yoga or pilates studios in Boston and show details on their intro offers and walking time from Beacon Hill.”) and using Search to plan meals and vacations won’t be available unless you opt in to Search Labs, the company’s platform that lets people try out experimental features.

But a big new feature that

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is calling AI Overviews and which the company has been testing for a year now, is finally rolling out to millions of people in the US.

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Search will now present AI-generated answers on top of the results by default, and the company says that it will bring the feature to more than a billion users around the world by the end of the year.

Gemini on Android

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is integrating Gemini directly into Android. When Android 15 releases later this year, Gemini will be aware of the app, image or video that you’re running, and you’ll be able to pull it up as an overlay and ask it context-specific questions. Where does that leave

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Assistant that already does this? Who knows!

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didn’t bring it up at all during today’s keynote.

There were a bunch of other updates too.

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said it would add digital watermarks to AI-generated video and text, make Gemini accessible in the side panel in Gmail and Docs, power a virtual AI teammate in Workspace, listen in on phone calls and detect if you’re being scammed in real time, and a lot more.

Catch up on all the news from

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I/O 2024 right here!

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android, news, gear,

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,

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io 2024, AI
#announced #

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#including #Gemini #Project #Astra #Android

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