If there’s one thing to come out of Google I/O 2024 that really caught my eye, it’s Google ’s Project Astra. In short, Astra is a new AI assistant with speech, vision, text, and memory capabilities. You can talk to it as if it were another person in the room, ask it to describe things it sees, and even ask it to remember information about those things.
Related ‘That’s a good stick figure!’ Project Astra: Our vision for the future of AI assistants Google walked us through a handful of Astra demos: Alliteration, Pictionary, Storytelling, and Free Form. They all did what you’d expect, and they were all equally impressive. For some context, the Astra demo Google showed during its I/O keynote had the AI running on a phone. In the demo I saw , Astra was running on a laptop and connected to a camera plus a touchscreen display.
It was a subtle moment, but it really drove home just how different Astra is from, say, Google Assistant. No one needed to ask, “Hey Astra, what do you think about this stick figure?” It saw the stick figure, heard the Googler talk about it, and provided feedback all on its own. It was kind of jaw-dropping. From there, the Astra team member put a skull emoji on the stick figure’s outstretched hand. When asked what play the drawing was supposed to represent, Astra immediately guessed Hamlet.
Hearing is believing Perhaps what stuck out to me the most during my demo was just how natural Astra felt. The Astra team members never needed to say “Hey Astra” or “OK Astra” to get its attention for voice commands. Once Astra was up and running, it was able to continuously listen for questions/commands/comments and respond to those as if it were another person in the room.
Is Astra really the AI of the future? As the name “Project Astra” suggests, Astra is very much still a work in progress and not something Google is ready to ship anytime soon.
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