Is Google’s Project Astra really the future of computing, and can we even trust it? Do we even want to?
I tried Google's Project Astra AI Assistant
Google’s Project Astra will give us real, conversational AI like the ones we see in the movies. To do this, it will listen to you and also use your phone’s camera to constantly observe the world around you. Meanwhile, Open AI has a new bot that constantly monitors your computer screen and remembers everything you do to create a virtual assistant. It’s the kind of computing that sci-fi always promised, but we’re not there yet.
“While Project Astra and similar technologies represent significant advances, it is crucial not to blindly trust their output,” Viacheslav Petrenko, Chief Technology Officer at IT software company LITSLINK, told Lifewire via email. “Like any tool, Project Astra does not absolve users of responsibility; it requires discernment and verification. We should use such technologies as tools, not as a substitute for critical thinking and expertise.”
Google's Astra combines input from a phone's camera and microphone into a timeline, while encoding each frame of video so it can analyze it. The model, which uses Google's Gemini AI, can then refer back to this timeline.
