Google announced on Tuesday during Google I/O 2025 that Project Astra — the company’s low latency, multimodal AI experience — will power an array of new experiences in Search, the Gemini AI app, and products from third-party developers.
Most notably, Project Astra is powering a new Search Live feature in Google Search. When using AI Mode, Google’s AI-powered search feature, or Lens, the company’s visual search feature, users can click the “Live” button to ask questions about what they’re seeing through their smartphone’s camera. Project Astra streams live video and audio into an AI model, and responds with answers to users’ questions with little to no latency.
First unveiled at Google I/O 2024 through a viral smart glasses demo, Project Astra was born out of Google DeepMind as a way to showcase nearly real-time, multimodal AI capabilities. Google now says it’s building those Project Astra glasses with partners including Samsung and Warby Parker, but the company doesn’t have a set launch date yet. What the company does have is a variety of Project Astra-powered features for consumers and developers.
Google says Project Astra is powering a new feature in its Live API, a developer-facing endpoint that enables low-latency voice interactions with Gemini. Starting Tuesday, developers can build experiences that support audio and visual input, and native audio output — much like Project Astra. Google says the updated Live API also has enhanced emotion detection, meaning the AI model will respond more appropriately, and includes thinking capabilities from Gemini’s reasoning AI models.
In the Gemini app, Google says Project Astra’s real-time video and screen-sharing capabilities are coming to all users. While Project Astra already powers Gemini Live’s low-latency conversations, this visual input was previously reserved for paid subscribers.
Google seems confident that Project Astra is the future for many of its products, and even can power an entirely new product category: smart glasses. While that may be true, Google still hasn’t set a launch date for the Project Astra smart glasses it demoed last year. The company has offered a few more details on what those smart glasses will look like, but they still seem far from reality.
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene.
