GoKawiilGoogle just wrapped its keynote address at its annual I/O developer event. The company showed off a swath of new agentic AI features and some demos of its upcoming Android-powered smart glasses.
As it has in the past few years, the spectacle largely revolved around Google’s perpetual stream of AI efforts. The company says that 900 million people use its Gemini assistant, and people have generated more that 50 billion images with Gemini.
Google’s goal for 2026 is to put AI agents at the forefront of all its biggest services: Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, and the Chrome browser. In a demo briefing the day before I/O, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was in a period of “hyper progress” with its AI efforts, but acknowledged that this is the part of that cycle “where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.”
Here is everything Google announced at I/O 2026. And if you’re wondering where all the Android 17 news is, Google told us all about that last week.
Search Party
Google is going all in on keeping people on Search by trying to integrate it into every part of your life. The company has embedded its AI agents directly in Google Search in something it calls the “intelligent search box.” This new search experience starts rolling out to everyone today.
When you ask the search box questions like, “What is a black hole?” or “Are Google AI Overviews devastating the journalism industry,” it will respond with more contextual answers or use generative AI to create images or short video clips that help explain the concept. As an example, Google showed a search about black holes, and its AI agent generated a video that visually explains the process, plopping it right into the search results.
Search is also getting a Generative UI feature, which creates different ways of viewing information from search results, so different types of responses—videos, images, news articles—get custom layouts that are generated in the browser on the fly, based on what’s the most relevant. Generative UI will start showing up in everyone’s Google searches this summer.
Search agents are also being integrated more deeply across Google’s platforms. In March, Google released Ask Maps, which lets users ask questions on Maps like you would interact with a chatbot.
Gemini Everywhere
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