Google just had its big I/O developer shindig and product announcement event today in California. As it has for the past couple of years, Google continued to go all in on AI. In an I/O keynote address, Google executives announced new AI features coming to absolutely everything. It’s in Android, Search, Gemini, and—sooner or later—a pair of Google’s smart glasses. We’ve already blogged all about the event as it happened live. Here’s everything Google announced at I/O.
Gemini Juices Up
Google Assistant, the occasionally useful digital servant at the bottom of your phone, is being replaced, more or less everywhere, by Google’s AI usurper, Gemini. Google announced a slew of updates to Gemini, the most impressive of which is Gemini Live. This new feature combines input from your phone’s camera, voice commands, and an agent-like ability to search the web, make phone calls, and collate information for you. It’s an extension of the experiments we saw last year that were code-named Project Astra, where Google’s machine intelligence engine can describe what it sees through a connected camera, remember key facts about your environment, and do hands-free tasks that you ask it to do by chatting with it in a natural way. Gemini is making its way into Google’s suite of productivity apps too, the most illustrative of which is a new feature in Gmail called Personalized Smart Replies. It uses AI to absorb your personal writing style and preferred syntax—culled from all of your notes, emails, docs, and spreadsheets—and use it to generate long replies to emails that match your personal voice.
There’s a new subscription tier for Gemini power users. Some of these Gemini features will be coming to users of Android and Google’s web apps for free, but others (and the more powerful feature sets) will be available via paid subscription. Google’s $20 a month AI Premium service has been renamed to Google AI Pro, and the cost stays the same, though it now comes with more limited features. Google AI Ultra, the company’s full suite of AI services, has increased to $250 per month. That’s $50 per month more expensive than OpenAI’s similar full-suite plan, ChatGPT Pro.
Gemini Is an Artist, Actually
Creative professionals and programmers take note: Google’s enhancements to its creative tools will either make your job easier and more productive, or it will render you obsolete. Jules is an “asynchronous coding agent” that aims to let you take a rough design scribbled on a napkin and turn it into a full-fledged illustration or code, while showing you the work it did along the way. There’s also a new version of Google’s AI image generator called Imagen 4 that Google claims can generate much more detail in images, like textures in AI-generated paintings or custom text in music posters. Google also has some new generative AI video tools, like Flow, a tool made specifically for AI movie creation. It lets you upload photos or illustrations of characters, props, or scenery, then animate it all into a short movie using text prompts. If you don’t have photos, you can just type a generative prompt to make the visuals right inside Flow.
Search Goes Full AI Mode
Last year at I/O, Google unleashed its AI Overviews enhancement to search results, a feature that summarizes results from across the web at the top of the screen for some queries. The results were famously varied, from being just plain busted to having hilarious hallucinations to showing actual plagiarism. Nevertheless, Google is now giving its search experience an even shinier AI sheen. To that end, Google is making search much more chatbot-oriented with its new AI Mode. This search feature was first announced in March 2025 as an experiment, and now it’s available within the default Google search experience for everyone in the US. AI Mode appears in a tab within your search results, so you can switch over to it with a click if it’s available. Google says AI Mode is designed to answer more complicated search queries that can factor in a variety of questions. It won’t give better results for everything, but trickier queries should get more satisfying results.
