Google announces slew of AI advances, including personal AI assistant coming soon

Google will soon unleash a wealth of new artificial intelligence-powered tools and systems, including an AI assistant that will help users by proactively performing tasks on their behalf. “Agentic” AI, the recent buzzword of choice for tech firms, was a central focus of Google's annual developers conference, Google I/O. The upcoming AI agent, Gemini Spark, was one of many of the company's announcements from the conference Tuesday. “We are firmly in our agentic Gemini era,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday before a packed amphitheater near the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. “I’ve played around with all sorts of agents and you can really see the potential, but it’s still early days when it comes to making agents easy to use, super secure and truly helpful.” Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., have poured billions into AI development.

Its top finance executive said on a call with investors in late April that this year’s capital expenditures may climb as high as $190 billion.

But the investment seems to be paying off, with its quarter