Google Unveils Project Astra: A Universal AI Assistant Running on...

Google demonstrated Project Astra at its annual I/O developer conference, unveiling a universal AI assistant embedded into a new generation of augmented reality smart glasses developed in partnership with Warby Parker. Astra uses a continuous multimodal stream from the glasses camera and microphone to answer questions about the physical world in real time, reading signage, identifying objects, suggesting navigation, and translating spoken conversations simultaneously. The demonstration showed Astra identifying a complex circuit board and suggesting a repair, reading a foreign-language menu and summarising dishes, and navigating a building by reading floor maps. Google confirmed Astra is powered by Gemini Ultra 2 running partly on-device and partly on cloud inference. India-based software developers are among the first cohort invited to build third-party applications for the Astra platform via the Project Astra SDK.