Since its original launch at Google I/O 2024, Project Astra has become a testing ground for Google’s AI assistant ambitions. The multimodal, all-seeing bot is not a consumer product, really, and it won’t soon be available to anyone outside of a small group of testers. What Astra represents instead is a collection of Google’s biggest, wildest, most ambitious dreams about what AI might be able to do for people in the future. Greg Wayne, a research director at Google DeepMind, says he sees Astra as “kind of the concept car of a universal AI assistant.”
Eventually, the stuff that works in Astra ships to Gemini and other apps. Already that has included some of the team’s work on voice output, memory, and some basic computer-use features. As those features go mainstream, the Astra team finds something new to work on.
