AI announcements from Google I/O 2024

Google I/O was jam-packed with AI announcements. Here's a roundup of all the latest developments.

1. Google is introducing "Ask Photos," a feature that allows Gemini to search your Google Photos library in response to your questions. Example: Gemini can identify a license plate number and provide an accompanying picture for confirmation.

2. Google Lens now allows video-based searches. You can record a video, ask a question, and Google's AI will find relevant answers from the web.

3. Google introduced Gemini 1.5 Flash, a new AI model optimized for fast responses in narrow, high-frequency, low-latency tasks.

4. Google has enhanced Gemini 1.5 to improve its translation, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Additionally, the context window of Gemini 1.5 Pro has been doubled from 1 million to 2 million tokens.

5. Google announced Project Astra, a multimodal AI assistant designed to be a do-everything AI agent. It will use your device's camera to understand surroundings, remember item locations, and perform tasks on your behalf.

6. Google unveiled Veo, a new generative AI model rivaling OpenAI's Sora. Veo can generate 1080p videos from text, image, and video prompts, offering various styles like aerial shots or timelapses. It's available to some creators for YouTube videos and is being pitched to Hollywood for potential use in films.

7. Google is launching Gems, a custom chatbot creator similar to OpenAI's GPTs. Users can instruct Gemini to specialize in various tasks. Example: It can be customized to help users learn Spanish by providing personalized language learning exercises and practice sessions. This feature will soon be available to Gemini Advanced subscribers.

8. A new feature, Gemini Live, will enhance voice chats with Gemini by adding extra personality to the chatbot's voice and allowing users to interrupt it mid-sentence.

9. Google is introducing "AI Overviews" in search. With this update, a specialized Gemini model will design and populate results pages with summarized answers from the web, similar to tools like Perplexity.

10. Google is adding Gemini Nano, the lightweight version of its Gemini model, to Chrome on desktop. This built-in assistant will use on-device AI to help generate text for social media posts, product reviews, and more directly within Google Chrome.