Project Astra is Google’s first true AI assistant

Move over Google Assistant; Google has a brand new personal AI assistant that it’s much cooler and more useful than anything it did before. It’s called Project Astra, and it’s powered by Google’s Gemini AI.

Project Astra is an agent-type AI product that uses Gemini’s multimodality to answer real-time questions about the world around you.

It sounds a lot like OpenAI’s new GPT-4o upgrade that ChatGPT just got. That’s because it is. But Project Astra has at least one exciting advantage over ChatGPT that was obvious from the first demo we saw at Google I/O 2024.

Unlike OpenAI, Google did not give us a live demo of Project Astra. But we got something almost as good: A recorded demo of a live experience with Project Astra running on the phone.

Just like GPT-4o, Project Astra can see the world around you and answer questions about it. In Google’s demos, the AI looked at code but also identified objects in a room that could play music.