Project Astra is the future of AI at Google

By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

“I’ve had this vision in my mind for quite a while,” says Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind and the leader of Google’s AI efforts. Hassabis has been thinking about and working on AI for decades, but four or five years ago, something really crystallized. One day soon, he realized, “we would have this universal assistant. It’s multimodal, it’s with you all the time.” Call it the Star Trek Communicator; call it the voice from Her; call it whatever you want. “It’s that helper,” Hassabis continues, “that’s just useful. You get used to it being there whenever you need it.” 

At Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, Hassabis showed off a very early version of what he hopes will become that universal assistant. Google calls it Project Astra, and it’s a real-time, multimodal AI assistant that can see the world, knows what things are and where you left them, and can answer questions or help you do almost anything. In an incredibly impressive demo video that Hassabis swears is not faked or doctored in any way, an Astra user in Google’s London office asks the system to identify a part of a speaker, find their missing glasses, review code, and more. It all works practically in real time and in a very conversational way.

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