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 Google is adding Gemini-powered AI automation to more tasks in Workspace. In its Tuesday Google I/O keynote, the company said its advanced Gemini 1.5 Pro will soon be available in the Workspace side panel as "the connective tissue across multiple applications with AI-powered workflows," as AI grows more intelligent, learns more about you and automates more of your workflow.
Gemini's job in Workspace is to save you the time and effort of digging through files, emails and other data from multiple apps. "Workspace in the Gemini era will continue to unlock new ways of getting things done," Google Workspace VP Aparna Pappu said at the event.
The refreshed Workspace side panel, coming first to Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive, will let you chat with Gemini about your content. Its longer context window (essentially, its memory) allows it to organize, understand and contextualize your data from different apps without leaving the one you're in. This includes things like comparing receipt attachments, summarizing (and answering back-and-forth questions about) long email threads, or highlighting key points from meeting recordings.
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While Google and OpenAI have been racing to win the AI crown over the past year, we've seemingly reverted away from the idea of speaking to virtual assistants. Generative AI products have typically launched with text-only inputs, and only later add the ability to search images and basic voice commands. At Google I/O today, the company showed off Gemini Live, a new mobile experience for natural conversations with its AI.
Google offered up a few potential use cases; You could have a conversation with Gemini Live to help prepare for a job interview, where it could potentially ask you relevant questions around the positions. It could also give you public speaking tips if you want to research a speech. What makes Gemini Live unique is that you'll be able to speak at your own pace, or even interrupt its responses if you'd like. Ideally, it should be more like having a conversation with a person, instead of just voicing smart assistant commands or generative AI queries.
At I/O, Google also showed off Project Astra, a next-generation virtual assistant that takes the concept of Gemini Live even further. Astra is able to view your camera feed and answer questions in real-time. It's unclear how long that'll take to arrive, but Google says some of Astra's live video features will come to Gemini Live later this year. Gemini Live will be available for Gemini Advanced subscribers in the next few months.
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 Google just announced some nifty improvements to its Gemini AI chatbot for Android devices as part of the company's I/O 2024 event. The AI is now part of the Android operating system, allowing it to integrate in a more comprehensive way.
The coolest new feature wouldn't be possible without that integration with the underlying OS. Gemini is now much better at understanding context as you control apps on the smartphone. What does this mean exactly? Once the tool officially launches as part of Android 15, you'll be able to bring up a Gemini overlay that rests on top of the app you're using. This will allow for context-specific actions and queries.
Google gives the example of quickly dropping generated images into Gmail and Google Messages, though you may want to steer clear of historical images for now. The company also teased a feature called "Ask This Video" that lets users pose questions about a particular YouTube video, which the chatbot should be able to answer. Google says this should work with "billions" of videos. There's a similar tool coming for PDFs.
Google
It's easy to see where this tech is going. Once Gemini
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Google's new voice-operated AI assistant, called Astra, can make sense of what your phone's camera sees. It was announced one day after OpenAI revealed a similar vision for ChatGPT.
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Here's what's in the latest iOS updates and how to use the latest features.
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In a video demonstrating the prowess of its new Project Astra app, the person demonstrating asked Gemini "do you remember where you saw my glasses?" The AI impressively responded "Yes, I do. Your glasses were on a desk near a red apple," despite said object not actually being in view when the question was asked. But these weren't your bog-standard visual aid. These glasses had a camera onboard and some sort of visual interface!
The tester picked up their glasses and put them on, and proceeded to ask the AI more questions about things they were looking at. Clearly, there is a camera on the device that's helping it take in the surroundings, and we were shown some sort of interface where a waveform moved to indicate it was listening. Onscreen captions appeared to reflect the answer that was being read aloud to the wearer, as well. So if we're keeping track, that's at least a microphone and speaker onboard too, along with some kind of processor and battery to power the whole thing.
We only caught a brief glimpse of the wearable, but from the sneaky seconds it was in view, a few things were evident. The glasses had a simple black frame and didn't look at all like Google Glass. They didn't appear very bulky, either.
In all likelihood, Google is not ready to actually launch a pair of glasses at I/O. It breezed right past the wearable's appearance and barely mentioned them, only to say that Project Astra and the company's vision of "universal agents" could come to devices like our phones or glasses. We don't know much else at the moment, but if you've been mourning Google Glass or the company's other failed wearable products, this might instill some hope yet.
Catch up on all the news from Google I/O 2024 right here!
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