Google I/O, Googleโs biggest developer conference of the year, is nearly upon us.
Scheduled for May 20 to 21 at theย Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, I/O will showcase product announcements from across Googleโs portfolio. Expect plenty of news relating to Android, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, and โ of course โ Googleโs AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.
Earlier this week, Google hosted a separate event dedicated to Android updates: The Android Show. The company announced new ways to find lost Android phones and other items, additional device-level features for its Advanced Protection program, security tools to protect against scams and theft, and a new design language called Material 3 Expressive.
Hereโs what else you can expect.
Gemini and AI
AI is the tech du jour, and Google, like its rivals, has been investing heavily in it.
A shoo-in for I/O is a new addition (or several) to Googleโs flagship Gemini family of AI models. Leaks over the past few weeks suggest that an updated Gemini Ultra model is on the way, Gemini Ultra being Googleโs top-of-the-line Gemini offering.
With this upgraded Gemini Ultra may come a pricier Gemini subscription.
Google offers a single premium tier, Gemini Advanced ($20 per month), to unlock additional capabilities in its Gemini chatbot, which is powered by the companyโs Gemini models. But Google may soon launch two new plans, Premium Plus and Premium Pro. Itโs not yet clear what benefits might be attached and how these plans might be priced relative to Gemini Advanced.
Google will almost certainly talk about Astra, its wide-ranging effort to build AI apps and โagentsโ for real-time, multimodal understanding. Also probably on the agenda is Project Mariner, Googleโs AI โagentsโ that can navigate and take action across the web on a userโs behalf. Folks on X spotted references to โComputer Useโ in the code for Googleโs AI Studio developer platform, which could well pertain to Mariner.
Everything else
Going by the official I/O schedule, Google will have plenty to discuss following The Android Show and I/O keynote addresses.
The schedule lists sessions dedicated to Chrome and Google Cloud, Google Play (the Android app store), Android development tools, and Gemma, Googleโs collection of โopenโ AI models.
Last year, Google unveiled a few AI-themed surprises at I/O, including a set of models fine-tuned for education applications called LearnLM. An upgrade to Googleโs viral podcast-generating NotebookLM could be one such surprise. Leaked code reveals a โVideo Overviewsโ tool that presumably would create video summaries, most likely leveraging Googleโs Veo 2 video-generating model.
Updated: 3:19 p.m. Pacific: Added a list of new Android features announced during The Android Show.
