Summarize with AI
By Cory Wasielczyk, Digital Media Strategist, Pink Dog Digital
Google’s annual I/O event always attracts attention as one of the key avenues for the search giant to announce new features, products, and evolutions to its software. This year was no exception: Google’s keynote address this year, hosted by CEO Sundar Pichai, was heavy on announcements related to its Gemini AI model. We got a new version of Gemini, an expansion of AI agents into products like Gmail, Docs, and YouTube, a “reboot” of Google Glass, and new evolutions to their core Search product.
Today, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of the biggest announcements from this year’s Google I/O event, along with some initial reactions.
New Gemini Model – Gemini 3.5
Pichai noted early on in the keynote, held live at Shoreline Amphitheatre near Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA, that the Gemini app had surpassed 900 million monthly active users. That’s more than double the count from last year, making the Gemini app one of the fastest growing platforms in the world.
Today, that model got a refresh in the form of Gemini 3.5, which rolled out to all Gemini users during the keynote. The new model’s key selling point is efficiency gains – Google claims that Gemini 3.5 delivers “frontier-level capabilities at less than half the price of comparable frontier models”. This refers to the cost for the tokens that are the basic unit of data whenever you run a task on an AI model.
(If this is your first time hearing of “tokens” in the context of AI, we highly recommend this blog from Nvidia explaining what they are and how they are used.)
We’ll await independent testing on the capabilities of Gemini 3.5 as it relates to other frontier models like ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7. But the lower token costs should make Gemini a more attractive option for bigger businesses, especially those who have already blown through their annual AI budgets this year.
Conversational AI Expansion
Google also announced an expansion of conversational AI features into its products.
First, YouTube is getting a new feature called “Ask YouTube”, which is able to take a user query and deliver a complete explanation, sourcing links to various YouTube videos to watch. This will roll out in the summer in the U.S.
Second, Google Docs is getting an upgrade in the form of “Docs Live”. You’ll be able to dictate verbally whatever is on your mind and Gemini creates the document for you. You’ll even be able to edit them verbally as well. This feature is planned for paid subscribers for the summer.
Google also mentioned plans to bring conversational capabilities to Gmail and other products in the future.
Again, we’ll wait to pass judgment on these expansions until we’ve had the chance to use them in the wild. But as long as Google doesn’t force these AI capabilities on its user base, we should view these as nice upgrades to the core experience on their products.
New Agentic AI Capabilities
Google spent a lot of time during the keynote announcing and demoing new agentic AI capabilities and products. A lot of what they showed, truthfully, was only interesting to software developers and techies like us. But there were a few announcements that could be of interest to the general public too.
For example, Google announced a new product called Gemini Spark, which Pichai described as “your personal AI agent in Gemini app that helps you navigate your digital life, taking action on your behalf and under your direction.” The agentic system runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud and is planned to integrate with third-party tools. This sounds like we may be one step closer to having personal AI assistants. However, disappointingly, Google did not announce a release for Spark – just a beta test for Gemini Ultra subscribers starting next week.
Agents also featured prominently in Google’s announced updates to their core Search product. Google announced that they would be integrating agents into Search. They gave examples of how this could be used by consumers; mostly revolving around setting up alerts for things like sneaker drops and concert ticket sales.
However, another interesting development was the demo of what Google called the “Universal Cart”. This is another agentic system that allows you to place products from various different sellers in one centralized cart. You can then check out using Google Pay, or go to the vendor’s website to complete a sale there. You can also set up AI agents to automatically purchase items for you if certain criteria, such as prices, are met. Google also emphasized that users would have total control over their agents – perhaps preempting concerns that agents might run up credit cards without the permission of their users.
Agentic AI, right now, is still in its infancy, and there are problems that are associated with relying on agentic systems. The example above is a good fear to have – you can’t have agents making transactions without express permission from the user. What would happen if the user tried to return the unwanted items? And there’s also a more practical issue – that AI systems tend to degrade and lose the guardrails the user puts on their abilities over time. We’ll need to see improvements in this area before we confidently recommend utilizing agents in your day to day life. But the potential is definitely exciting.
Changes to Search
Search is also evolving further to support new longer queries that users are comfortable asking AI systems. When you ask the search box a question, it will respond with contextual answers, generate images or short video clips to explain the concept you’re asking about, and format answers in a relevant way.
While this does mean that AI will feature more prominently in SERPs moving forward, we definitely do not agree with the idea that “search is dead”, which some SEOs have been proclaiming. Search is Google’s money printer – they generated billions of dollars of revenue from advertising in their main search function. While there are reports that Google is testing ad placements in their AI features, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Google is going all in and making AI Mode the default search experience.
Other Announcements
- “Intelligent Eyewear”: years after Google Glass was unceremoniously canned, Google is returning with new sets of smart glasses. The first set, designed by Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, are audio-only glasses that connect to your phone and speak to you directly in your ear. There is also a set with a built-in display that is scheduled to arrive after the audio glasses are released.
- SynthID: Google launched a watermarking system called SynthID three years ago that marked AI-generated images and videos. At I/O, Google announced the addition of Content Credentials verification into its products, which will show you if visual content was generated by AI, or if it has been edited by AI tools. Google also announced that OpenAI and Nvidia both have signed on to the SynthID watermark. We can only hope that this will help users better detect AI-generated content on platforms!
Next Up: Marketing Live
That wraps up the major announcements from Google I/O 2026. As expected, expanding AI capabilities in their product lines was a major focus for Google at this year’s event. Many of these capabilities seem like they could end up being genuinely helpful for the everyday occasional user of AI – not just power users like us!
We do wonder whether AI saturation is reaching a tipping point; however, if Google implements these additions seamlessly, we don’t think there will be much fuss raised. People will use it if they want to, and they won’t if they don’t.
The next major Google event was Marketing Live, with a greater focus on the marketing side of Google’s product lines. We’ll bring coverage of all the announcements from that event in the next couple of days!
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