On Tuesday, Google announced during Google I/O 2025 that Project ASTRA (the company’s low-incubation AI experience) will search for new experiences, Gemini AI apps, and product arrays from third-party developers.
Most notably, Project Astra has a new live search feature in Google Search. When using AI mode, Google’s AI-powered search function, or lenses (the company’s visual search function), users can click the “live” button and ask questions about what they are looking at through their smartphone camera. Project Astra streams live video and audio to AI models and responds with answers to user questions with little or no delay.
First announced at Google I/O 2024 through a Virus Smart Glasses demo, Project Astra was born from Google DeepMind as a way to showcase near-real-time multimodal AI capabilities. Google says it is currently building Project Astra Glasses with partners such as Samsung and Warby Parker, but the company has yet to have a launch date. What the company has is features equipped with a variety of project Astra for consumers and developers.
Google says Project Astra has new features in the Live API. This is a developer endpoint that allows for low-latency voice interaction with Gemini. Starting Tuesday, developers will be able to build experiences that support audio and visual inputs, as well as native audio outputs, similar to Project Astra. According to Google, the updated live APIs enhance emotion detection. That is, the AI model responds better and includes thinking capabilities from Gemini’s inference AI model.
In the Gemini app, Google says Project Astra’s real-time video and screen sharing capabilities are reaching all users. Project Astra already has strengthened Gemini Live’s low-latency conversations, but this visual input was previously reserved for paid subscribers.
Google seems to be confident that Project Astra is the future for many products, and is even sure it can drive a brand new product category, Smart Glasses. That may be true, but Google has not yet set a launch date for the project ASTRA smart glasses that it demoed last year. The company offers more details on what those smart glasses look like, but they still seem far from reality.