Everything announced at Google I/O 2024

Android, Wear OS, Pixel, and more. Google has some of the world’s biggest and most well-known brands under its belt, and Google I/O is its annual software celebration that sets the stage for everything the company has planned for the coming year. This year looks to be no less packed than usual, and the keynote speech at the start of the event is, as always, when we’re likely to see the biggest announcements and news.

Android 15, Wear OS 5, and Google Gemini are at the top of the list of announcements we expect to hear during the Google I/O keynote speech, but as always, keep an eye out for some surprising reveals we weren’t expecting. While unlikely to come as full announcements, we may also hear about the upcoming Google Pixel 9 range and Pixel Watch 3.

Here’s everything announced at Google I/O 2024. Keep checking back often, as we’ll update this article throughout the show as more news comes in.

Gemini AI rules the roost

It should come as a surprise to no-one that AI is taking center stage at this Google I/O. It seems as if the world has talked about nothing but for this entire last year, and Google has never been a company to ignore a rampant trend like this. Google is fully in its “Gemini era”, according to CEO Sundar Pichai, so expect to see AI touching every part of this year’s announcements.

Over 1.5 million developers use the AI model formerly known as Bard, and Gemini is available to over 2 billion users on Android. AI Overview, Gemini’s integration with the main Google search engine, is coming to the U.S. and other countries soon. Gemini will be added to Google Photos as well, adding extra search abilities through the Ask Photos function. Ask it “what’s my license plate again” and it’ll search through your photos to find the most likely answer, stopping you from needing to manually look through your photos to find it yourself. Ask Photos will launch in the summer.

Notebook LM, spotlighted at last year’s Google I/O, will also have Gemini introduced into it, pushing its AI smarts to even higher levels. During the presentation, we were shown it being asked to break down science using basketball as an example. This sort of personalization for learning is likely to become more prevalent as we move into the future.

Gemini 1.5 Pro will be available for all developers and advanced users from today, in over 35 languages.

Gemini Agents can do it for you

Project Astra

Another experimental project for Google is Astra. This ties Gemini into cameras, and allows it to understand and interpret the world around it. In the demo we saw, Astra was able to identify a speaker, break down which part of the speaker made noises, and read code and explain it. Astra could also be used to add AI into a pair of smart glasses, as was shown off in the demo.

This isn’t something we haven’t seen before — ChatGPT has shown off something similar — but it’s hard to say Astra isn’t still impressive. Unfortunately, there’s no timeline on when this is likely to be released, and for how much.

Generative AI

Generative AI is the most mainstream AI out there, and Google isn’t ignoring this most important element of AI. Its newest AI model for creating images is called Imagine 3, and Google claims it’s the best model its made so far for creating images with words, but also at understanding prompts.

It’s not just about images too, and Google has been working hard on creating AI models for generating music, and Veo, an AI model that can create some very impressive HD videos. Prompts can be used to edit existing videos, so you don’t need to recreate videos from scratch every time, and the video examples shown definitely look better than most videos created by AI. Google is lending the power of Veo to Donald Glover, who is in the process of creating a movie using this new AI model.

Image and video tools can be found in ImageFX and Video FX.

Generative AI will also be used in Google Search, thanks to a custom build of Gemini. AI Overviews are key to this, helping you to speed up your research rather than having to jump into various different websites. Multi-step reasoning will break down your requests, tapping into Google’s indexes to provide you the most relevant information. It can even help you to plan a trip.

One of the most impressive elements of AI Overview is the ability to use it to ask it a question during a video and get a customized and relevant overview that answers the question posed.

AI Overviews is available across the U.S. from today.

Gemini and Workspace