This Tuesday, Google presented Project Astra, its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant with “human abilities” that allow it to see, hear, remember, assimilate and speak; a futuristic tool that plans to launch at the end of the year.
The announcement, which a few years ago would only be possible in the script of a science fiction film, has been partly overshadowed by its rival OpenAI, a leading AI company that yesterday presented a similar voice assistant function. In both cases, users will be able to make a video call to the assistant and ask them all kinds of questions.
Google has today shown several examples – according to the company, recorded live and not manipulated in any way – in which one of its workers in London has asked the assistant what nickname he would give a pet, has asked him for help with coding programs and mathematicians, and also to find his glasses, after showing him a room.
Another quality that these technologies have is that they can be interrupted during their responses to move on to the next point of the conversation, and they can have different personalities, although in both examples a woman’s voice has been used.
“These agents were built on top of our Gemini model and other task-specific models, and were designed to process information faster by continuously encoding video frames, combining video and voice input into a timeline of events, and caching this information. to recover it efficiently,” the company explains in a statement.
Google has pulled an ace out of its sleeve by surprising us with the possibility of using this technology with smart glasses, in addition to a phone, although the company has not made specific announcements in this regard.
At its latest developer event, Meta has also noted that it is developing its smart glasses so that they can access their AI and answer users’ questions about what they see.
There are many technology companies that this year have opted for AI tools that interact with the user without the need for a phone or computer – such as The Rabbit R1 or Humane AI Pin – but none, so far, have achieved resounding success.
The launch of Google represents a redesign of the search engine that will favor answers prepared by artificial intelligence on links to websites, a change that promises to speed up the search for information, but, in turn, could reduce the flow of Internet traffic .
The makeover will begin this week in the United States, when hundreds of millions of people will periodically see artificial intelligence-generated conversation summaries at the top of the search engine results page.
By the end of the year, Google expects AI recurring summaries to be part of its search results for around one billion people. It is a measure that opens the door to greater growth and innovation, but also threatens to cause a radical change in web browsing habits.
