Google shapes Gemini into AI assistant for all

A substantial artificial intelligence (AI) layer, Google insists, will quickly find relevance and depth across Search, shopping, workspace, filmmaking and video communications platforms.

- Vishal Mathur

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA: That's crucial to their vision for a universal AI assistant, detailed at the annual Google I/O conference. This, as competition including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, too have made significant progress with their AI tools.

"More intelligence is available, for everyone, everywhere. And the world is responding, adopting AI faster than ever before...What all this progress means is that we're in a new phase of the AI platform shift. Where decades of research are now becoming a reality for people, businesses and communities all over the world," says Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet.

Pichai cites an example of Project Starline, a 3D video streaming technology from a few years ago, as an underlying tech for the new Google Beam AI video communications platform that rolls out later this year on HP's computing devices. One of its claimed party pieces—head movement tracking, to the millimeter.