From everything Google showed at Google I/O 2024, Undoubtedly, the Astra project surprised me the most, at the moment a prototype in the works, but which brings us closer to what the next generation of digital assistants based on artificial intelligence will be. It was also particularly interesting that this revelation came just 24 hours after OpenAI announced GPT-4o, a new multi-modal model that also showed us a fairly clear path with its voice mode that devices will take in the short and medium term.

Both revelations made many people think of Her, Spike Jonze’s sensational dystopia in which the operating system, whose interface is an artificial intelligence-based assistant, appears more human than many people, allowing it to provide an incredibly natural interaction experience. It doesn’t seem at all coincidental that the two tech companies decided to introduce an AI with a communication interface that closely resembles the one emulated by Scarlett Johansson in the film.

Reflecting on and reacting to the OpenAI announcement, I thought it important to clarify that what we’ve seen so far is still a long way from what Her has shown us, although it’s true that with the new Gemini Pro and its new context, the window of one million tokens, which could double by the end of the year (yes, VoC two million tokens), the rather important technical limitation in this sense is starting to become a little smaller. Even so, everything points to the fact that in the short term we will have much deeper and richer interactions, but that a single conversation with the context will not be established to infinitylike the one we can have among humans.

As we read in the MIT Technology Preview, Google’s Astra project will be unveiled later this year, which confirms that although it is still a prototype, its development has already advanced considerably, as we could deduce from watching the video they showed us, which you can find in this paragraph. Obviously, the demos are done under fairly controlled conditions, but even so, the result he showed us was pretty amazing.

There are two Microsoft events next week, so we’d expect them to show us something along those lines, but as of today, that doesn’t seem very likely. We can place more expectations along these lines on Apple’s WWDC 2024 next June, where we expect a major refresh of Siri, which could also come from collaboration signed between Apple and OpenAI, which could be based on GPT-4o.