During an avalanche of announcements on Wednesday, Google also published several opt-in forms for trusted testers for three different projects. One of them, already known as it was announced at Google I/O back in May earlier this year, is called Project Astra.
BREAKING ๐จ: Google Project Astra is now available to Trusted Testers and is planned for release in 2025.
โ TestingCatalog News ๐ (@testingcatalog) December 11, 2024
Project Astra announced in May on Google I/O will be powering Gemini Live with Vision ๐ pic.twitter.com/22SUW2zE1a
This project powers the vision capabilities on Gemini Live. Reportedly, Google announced that Project Astra became available to trusted testers shortly after the announcement, while the broader release is anticipated for 2025. In general, Project Astra will allow users to open the camera during a Gemini Live session, enabling Gemini to see the content through the camera and respond accordingly.
BREAKING ๐จ: Google announced Jules Experiment, allowing you to offload simple coding tasks to an autonomous AI agent.
โ TestingCatalog News ๐ (@testingcatalog) December 11, 2024
Powered by Gemini 2.0 and connected to Github. Trusted testers opt-in is available ๐ https://t.co/RwFRtqGI47 pic.twitter.com/Bwc6epLOqB
Besides this, two other projects were announced within the scope of Google Labs. One of them is called Jules, a potential solution for coding. The Gemini-powered code assistant in Jules would be able to independently handle small tasks, like bug fixing, and execute them autonomously. It will also have access to GitHub. While it is not yet clear if Jules will evolve into a full-featured code editor, the possibilities look very promising.
BREAKING ๐จ: Google opened a Trusted Tester opt-in form for their new "Project Mariner" experiment.
โ TestingCatalog News ๐ (@testingcatalog) December 11, 2024
It is a browser extension which will let Gemini to fully control your browser ๐คฏ https://t.co/ZQYPiZGzPm pic.twitter.com/iLHtqFQfb6
The third project is called Project Marine, which is equally exciting. It will exist as a Chrome extension, allowing Gemini to fully control the Chrome browser. Essentially, this means Gemini will be able to open web pages, view their content, and potentially execute tasks autonomously on behalf of the user.
Both Jules and Project Marine promise to bring a significant boost in productivity by automating smaller, repetitive tasks in our everyday digital workflows.