Google IO live updates: New 'Project Astra' AI agent and more announced

Next up, Lryia, Google's AI music generator

Google taps musician Wyclef Jean to demo the capabilities of AI music generation. Musicians including Marc Rebillet in a video say AI has revolutionized the practice of sampling songs to create new sounds.

Wow! The Project Astra demo is incredible and gets big applause from the crowd.

We're watching the new Project Astra AI agent, which is powered by Gemini, in action.

Its spatial understanding and memory are pretty impressive, drawing the biggest applause so far of the keynote.

In the demo, a Google employee walks around the DeepMind office in London, which Project Astra recognizes, and asks the Gemini if it remembers where she left her glasses.

Project Astra replied that she'd left them next to an apple on her desk in the office. She walks over there and, lo and behold, there are her glasses by the apple on her desk.

The AI agent "remembered" the glasses in the background of previous frames from the phone's live video feed.

(If Google's AI agent can help regular people never lose their glasses ever again — or their keys or other stuff at home or at work — then I think we might have a killer app.)

Some big news: "Project Astra"

Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis announces Project Astra, an AI agent that can respond quickly without lag, which was an engineering challenge.

The new AI agents can continually encode video and have better voice intonation.

The pace and quality of the interaction will feel more natural.

He rolls a demo of the AI agent.

DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis takes the Google IO stage for the first time ever.

Google Deepmind has been building AI systems that can do a bunch of amazing things, the executive says, including medical research and exploration into drug discovery.

Hassabis announces Gemini 1.5 Flash, which is a lighter-weight AI model than 1.5 Pro that is designed to be lower cost when scaling.

Flash is all about lower latency, which is important for applications powered by AI.

Next up, AI "agents"

The idea of AI agents is to handle the busy work and be actually useful to your daily life, helping you complete tasks.

Google's CEO talks about how AI agents can help handle all the painful parts of returning shoes after you decide you aren't keeping an order.

"We're thinking hard about how to do it in a way that's private and secure," Pichai says.

Google DeepMind will share more, Pichai says.

Now, we're seeing a Notebook LM demo of a new feature, Audio Overview.

We're seeing how the AI can help explain concepts like gravity to create an "age appropriate" basketball example to a youngster.

The demo shows the "real opportunity" with multimodality, Picah says.

Gemini will help you sift through your email and give the rundown on meetings

The AI assistant will give you the highlights of Google meetings, summarize emails, and craft responses.

It'll be available today in Workspace Labs.

Google's CEO talks up Gemini 1.5 Pro, and its longer AI token context windows.

Its Gemini 1.5 Pro model offered a 1 million token context window, and a video is playing showcasing how developers have taken advantage of the more complex work that's possible.

"1 million tokens is opening up entirely new possibilities," Pichai says.

Pichai says Gemini 1.5 Pro is rolling out to all developers globally.

Google's CEO also announces that it's expanding to an even longer 2 million token context window.

Next up: Google photos

Pichai says "Ask Photos" powered by Gemini is coming to Google Photos, which can help summarize photo memories and pull information from them.

You can ask Google Photos "what's my license plate number" and it'll recognize a car that appears often, and tell you that license plate number.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage, saying the company is fully in its "Gemini era."

Google's main AI model is called Gemini.

Pichai recaps Gemini 1.5 Pro and how powerful it is.

Today, "more than 1.5 million developers" use Gemini models across Google's tools, Pichai says.

Sundar talks about Google's most important single product: Search. It's the most profitable business on the internet, so he quite rightly goes to this early. The company has been carefully weaving generative AI features into Search in the past year. But that's only been a side test. Now, the big move is happening.

Pichai announced AI Overviews, a new genAI overlay on search results. It's partly based on the Search Generative Experience, which was Google's AI test run for Search in the AI era.

A fully revamped "AI Overview" is rolling out in the US and other countries soon, Pichai says.

Ok, here we go! Google is showing off a splashy video about how it's making AI helpful.

The Google IO keynote is officially kicking off, folks.

Musician and YouTuber Marc Rebillet is onstage as a warm-up act, using AI to mix some new tunes.

The musician, who is popular on TikTok and YouTube, shows off how a DJ could use Google'sMusic FX DJ AI to switch up a track.

"Something like that," he says. "The machine is good. It's helping you."

"Entirely unscripted, nothing planned," he says.

For those who want to watch the keynote, there's also a livestream.

The keynote is expected to last around 2 hours, but we'll keep track of the big news in our live blog so you don't have to.

Google says the music in the background as we wait for things to kick off is generated by its AI models.