Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Tuesday showed off Project Astra, an aspirational AI agent that the company says represents the future of artificial intelligence-powered assistants: AI that can react to the world like people do, remembering what it “sees” and “hears” to answer questions about the scene around it.
During its annual I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, Google demonstrated how such an agent might work. A pre-recorded video showed an employee walking through the office as the AI assistant used the phone’s camera to “see,” responding to questions about what was in the scene. The program correctly answered a question about which London neighborhood the office was located in, based on the view from the window, and also told the employee where she had left her.
