Google I/O 2025 Key Highlights: Android XR glasses, AI Mode in Search, Gemini 2.5 updates, and other big announcements

Keep a tab on the tech section of The Indian Express for more AI news coming out of Google I/O 2025.

Here's an easy-to-digest list of everything that was announced during the opening keynote of Google I/O 2025:

- Updates to Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro models, including native audio outputs

- Deep Think reasoning mode in Gemini 2.5 Pro

- Shopping in AI Mode, agentic checkout, and a virtual try-on tool

- New updates to Deep Research and Canvas

- Imagen 4

- Veo 3

- Synth ID detector

- Personalised smart replies in Gmail

- Speech translation in Meet

- Support for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP)

- Search Live in AI Mode and Lens

- Jules, an asynchronous AI coding agent

- Flow, a new AI filmmaking tool

- Beam, a 3D AI-first video communication platform

- Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscription plans

- A look at Android XR-powered smart glasses

- Expanded access to AI Overviews

- Gemini in Google Chrome

- Expanded access to Gemini Live's camera and screen sharing capabilities

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Google AI Pro will be available globally with a full suite of AI products, higher limits, and Gemini Advanced. It is priced at $19.99/month. Meanwhile, Google AI Ultra is priced at $249.99/month AI subscription plan, offering higher usage limits and access to its top-tier AI models and features. AI Ultra is only available in the US for now.

Google also launched a new Synth ID detector, a verification platform to help users identify whether a piece of content is AI-generated or now. Users have to just upload a piece of content and the SynthID Detector will identify if either the entire file or just a part of it has SynthID in it.

That means Veo 3, Google's AI video generator, can generate sound effects, background sounds, and dialogue.

The AI tool is available for Google Ultra subscribers in the US via the Gemini app and in Flow. It’s also available for enterprise users on Vertex AI.

Gemini is coming to the desktop version of Google Chrome but only for Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US. This enables users to ask Gemini to clarify or summarise any information on any webpage that users are reading. “In the future, Gemini will be able to work across multiple tabs and navigate websites on your behalf,” Google said.

With AI Mode, users who search for products will be shown a browsable panel of images and product listings personalised to their taste. The righthand panel dynamically updates with relevant products and images, helping users pinpoint exactly what they’re looking for and discover new brands.

AI Mode offers a more dynamic UI with a combination of text, images, and links. It uses a query fan-out technique to break down a user's question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously. This enables Search to dive deeper into the web than a traditional search on Google, helping users discover more of what the web has to offer and find hyper-relevant content that matches a user's question.

AI Mode will soon be able to make its responses even more helpful with personalised suggestions based on past searches. Users can also opt-in to connect other apps such as Gmail with AI Mode. "Because your flight and hotel confirmations are in your inbox, it will sync when you actually be in Nashville (for instance)."

Personal Context in AI Mode is coming this summer. AI Mode will also get Deep Search to help users unpack a topic. It can issue hundreds of searches on a user's behalf to create a research report.

Complex data analysis and visualisations will also be possible via AI Mode. Project Mariner's agentic capabilities also coming to AI Mode to help users, for instance, find ticket options for sporting events.

Jules, an AI agent powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro and capable of autonomously reading and generating code, makes its debut at Google I/0 2025. Users can integrate Jules directly into their existing code repositories. The AI coding agent then makes a clone of the user’s codebase within Google Cloud virtual machine (VM) to ‘understand’ the context of the project and perform tasks such as writing tests, building new features, fixing bugs, etc.

Tulsee Doshi, Senior Director, Product Management at Google DeepMind, onstage talking about the updated versions of Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro.

Using Agent Mode, the Gemini app can help users, for instance, find real-estate listings. Gemini uses MCP (Model Context Protocol) to access the listings and even schedule a tour on your behalf. Coming soon to subscribers.

Google Beam, is an AI-first video communication platform that has evolved from Project Starline, which Pichai said brings the world closer to having a “natural freeflowing conversation across languages”. Beam instantly translates spoken languages in “real-time, preserving the quality, nuance, and personality in their voices”.

"The world is adopting AI faster than ever before. There's one marker of progress. This time last year, we were processing 9.7 trillion tokens a month across our products and APIs. Now we are processing 480 trillion monthly tokens. That's about a 50 x increase in just a year," says Pichai

Adobe seems to have some serious competition coming its way.

There's a little over 28,000 folks tuned into the livestream right now. Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be taking the stage at any moment now so get your last-minute predictions in. You can also watch the keynote interpreted in American Sign Language here.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ4XL9rppuf/?igsh=MTJrcnk0ejR6dDM4eA%3D%3D

On the morning of Day 1 of the Google I/O developer conference, Apple has announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2025) will be taking place from June 9-13 this year. Just yesterday, Microsoft held its own conference (Build 2025) where CEO Satya Nadella announced a series of sweeping updates that reflect the tech giant's vision for an open agentic future.