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Project Astra

A virtual assistant that knows where you left your keys? That’s the dream.

In an incredibly impressive demo video that Hassabis swears is not faked or doctored in any way, an Astra user in Google’s London office asks the system to identify a part of a speaker, find their missing glasses, review code, and more. A lot of this is enabled by Gemini’s large context window, which means it can access a huge amount of information at a time, and Hassabis says it’s crucial to making it feel normal and natural to interact with your assistant. Hassabis says he’s bullish on phones and glasses as key devices for these agents but also says “there is probably room for some exciting form factors.” Astra is still in an early prototype phase and only represents one way you might want to interact with a system like Gemini.

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