I have been using Google assistant for years and I am clear that, with the exception of a few (some) concrete orders, it was not worth much more: understanding and contextualization are light years of expected in a natural human conversation, so except things like putting a timer or music, Google Wizard did not work as I expected.
Gemini is a revolution when they interact, because ultimately the experience is quite close to speaking to another person and Google also puts all the meat on the grill to make it more complete and integrate it anywhere. Gemini Live is pleasantly surprised, but in Google I / or we saw something that left my mouth open: That artificial intelligence controls your Android mobile It will soon be a reality.
Google objective: an assistant with omniscient and omnipotent
The idea is that your assistant can understand the context, detect problems and develop solutions that can be executed for us. An assistant who knows everything and can This even enters into action without having to invoke it. His name is Project Astra, we have heard about him for months and we have already seen him.
Thus, in Google I / where we saw the performances of its omnipotent and omniscient assistant like that A person has problems with the brakes of his bike And ask Astra to search for the online user manual. Once found, he asks you to search for the corresponding brake section and that from there, you find a video tutorial on YouTube and even contact a store to find out which parts you need. Astra not only, but even consults the store if it has stock of these parts.
Another example of spectacular use is told in The Verge: the product director of the Google Deepmind team concentrates with the camera of his mobile towards the Sony headphones and asks Astra to tell him what they are. As the majority of mortals would occur, it is not clear if they are the WH-1000XM4 or the WH-1000XM3. Well, Bibo Xiu asks him to pass the manual and explain how to match them with the mobile, in the middle of the explanation, ask him to match them.
And astra the fact: he is no longer looking for information on the internet or to see, he is able to prepare an explanation and Execute it by acting on devices. According to demos, Astra simulates the interactions on the screen to move the interface, analyzing its content.
Although impressive, these demos continue to show a certain margin of improvement. Without going further, the product manager of the Google Deepmind team had to manually activate a function to grant access to the mobile screen. However, it is still in the test phase and only the consolidated functions are integrated into tools such as Gemini to move to the general public.
Of course, Google has a clear action plan: 'Transform the app of Gemini into a universal AI assistant who performs daily tasks for us'. Without going further, Google's mode already replaces Google's search: a radical change in your information search engine, which is now as simple as have a natural conversation with the assistant Where he performs hundreds of simultaneous research of much deeper web results compared to traditional research using Gemini 2.5. And not only offer, but also helps you to perform these tasks from start to finish, because we have maintained in their demos.
Currently, even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems always require that you enter step by step, these data and the context and may always need to intervene manually. But as Astra has internet access and Google accesses, the objective is that as soon as possible All these steps are reduced to act alone.
Nor is it a technically easy task and also represents everything A confidentiality and security challenge That an application can access, understand and act against so much information. In theory, Astra could execute all of this at home with the Gemini Nano model, but it was not seen in the demo.
Develop something like that and works well (with the possible hallucinations of minors, something essential given the power it has) and implemented it that it will take time, but Google already makes the future progress and is the one in which it is in which A universal assistant will not need or will touch the mobile.
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Cover | Antonio Vallejo
