Anika Begay
Later this year, Google will add Project Astra, the computer vision technology it previewed at its developer conference in May, to Gemini Live. This will let you use your phone’s camera app to ask Gemini, in real time, about the objects you’re looking at in the real world. Imagine walking past a concert poster and asking it to save the dates in your calendar and set a reminder to buy tickets.
Talk to me
Our experiences with voice assistants up to this point have been largely transactional, so when I chatted with Gemini Live, I found it a little awkward to start a conversation with the bot. It’s a big step up from asking Google Assistant or Alexa for the weather, to open the blinds, or if your dog can eat celery. You might get a follow-up here and there, but it’s not built around the flow of a conversation the way Gemini Live was.
Hsiao tells me she likes to use Gemini Live in the car on her way home from work. She started a conversation about the Paris Olympics and Celine Dion singing at the opening ceremony. “Can you tell me about the song she sang?” Hsiao asked. The AI responded with the song’s origin, author, and meaning, and after some back-and-forth, Hsiao discovered that Celine Dion could sing in Chinese.
“I was so surprised,” she says. “But this is just one example of how you can discover things; it’s an interaction with technology that people haven’t had before, this kind of curiosity and exploration through conversation. This is just the beginning of where we’re going with the Gemini Assistant.”
In my demo, I asked Gemini what I should have for dinner. It asked if I wanted something light and refreshing or a hearty meal. We continued, back and forth, and when Gemini suggested a shrimp dish, I lied and said I was allergic to shrimp, to which it then suggested salmon. I said I didn’t have salmon. “You could always grill some chicken breasts and toss them in a salad with grilled lettuce and a light vinaigrette.” I asked for a recipe, and it started running through the step-by-step instructions. I stopped it, but I can go back to the Gemini app to find the recipe later.
