Google I/O 2026: Gemini Ultra 3, Project Astra goes live on Pixel, 2M context with real-time grounding, Veo 3.2, Imagen 4

Picture having a personal assistant that can read the entire contents of a small-town library in one sitting, remember every word, and then answer your questions while simultaneously checking today's news to make sure the answer is still accurate. That is roughly what Google unveiled at its annual developer conference in June 2026.

The headline announcement is Gemini Ultra 3, Google's most capable AI model to date. Its standout feature is a context window of 2 million tokens — roughly the equivalent of 1,500 novels worth of text processed in a single conversation. On top of that, the model can now ground its answers in live, up-to-the-minute information from the web, rather than being limited to what it learned during training months ago.

Project Astra, the visually aware conversational assistant Google demonstrated as a research preview last year, is now a real product available on Pixel phones. Point your camera at anything — a broken appliance, a restaurant menu in a foreign language, a complicated diagram — and Astra can explain, translate, or guide you through it in natural speech.

On the creative side, Veo 3.2 raises the bar for AI video generation with improved visual consistency and support for longer clips, while Imagen 4 produces photorealistic images with noticeably sharper rendering of fine details like text, faces, and architecture.

NotebookLM Plus — the tool that turns your documents and notes into smart summaries and audio podcasts — is being expanded to more users and organizations. And Android gets a new AI mode that weaves artificial intelligence directly into the operating system, making it available across every app without users having to switch to a separate assistant.