Google I/O 2026: All the news and announcements – The Verge

Gemini’s new AI agent is about as good as Google’s demo

2026-06-01T15:54:52-04:00

Google's new "24/7" AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I'm not sure it's worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs.

The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them in the background - even tasks that have multiple steps - allowing you to put your phone down or walk away from your computer. It also advertises at the very top of the Spark website that it's "always under your direction," that "you choose to turn it on," and that "it's designed to check with you before taking major actions." Given the moun …

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Google’s new anything-to-anything AI model is wild

2026-05-22T19:49:26-04:00

Just a stuffed deer having the time of his life. | Image: Gemini / The Verge

Last year I deepfaked my kid's stuffed animal to make it look like his plush deer was on vacation.

It was an experiment to see if I could re-create the events depicted in a Gemini ad Google was running, and I never showed the videos of Buddy the deer on his adventures to my four-year-old. But it was a revealing exercise that made me think a lot about the difference between some harmless fun with generative AI and full-on slop. Maybe that Venn diagram is a perfect circle! Maybe not. But what I know for sure is that the tools to make realistic videos are surprisingly good, requiring surprisingly little effort and know-how. And that trend is c …

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The cost of the smart home is going up

2026-05-27T10:26:42-04:00

Google is expanding its AI-powered Gemini for Home capabilities beyond its cameras and smart speakers to other manufacturers to sell more subscriptions. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people's homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions in the smart home. And it's not alone.

At Google I/O this week, Google announced it's expanding its Gemini for Home APIs to allow companies to integrate more of its Gemini-powered smart home features into their own apps. In a blog post, Google's Ravi Akella, director of product management for the Home Platform, …

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I can’t believe how fast Google vibe coded my first Android app

2026-05-21T10:18:10-04:00

That’s my own Android app. Bad, yet impressive. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Yesterday, I built my first Android app. Then, I made two more - three in one afternoon.

For one, I literally typed 148 words into my web browser and walked away. Ten minutes later, I had an entire new app on my actual Android phone. I did have to prep that phone by enabling a USB debugging mode and plugging it into my PC, but as advertised, Google's AI Studio did literally everything else for me.

I typed in words, I hit install, and voilà: an entire working program. I was nearly ready to agree with David, Allison, and Jen: The personal software revolution is here, it's coming to your phone, there's a future where the average person can m …

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‘Solve all diseases,’ you say?

2026-05-20T17:15:07-04:00

Let’s unpack what Demis Hassabis said at the end of yesterday’s Google I/O keynote.

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Toward the end of this year's Google I/O keynote, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis declared, with a completely deadpan face, that the company hopes to "reimagine the drug discovery process with the goal of one day solving all disease."

This is the sort of statement that the phras …

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Vibe coding is coming to your phone

2026-05-20T13:37:21-04:00

Coming to your homescreen soon: your own app. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

"There's an app for that" was the promise of the App Store from the very beginning. The app that will get your phone to do the thing you want it to? It's just a few taps away. The tagline wasn't strictly true - I'm still waiting for that one perfect grocery list app. Still, apps shaped the modern smartphone into what it is today. We spend all day, every day inside of apps - scrolling, listening, and tapping until we find what we want. But your next favorite app might just be one that you made yourself.

If you weren't familiar with the concept of "vibe coding" at the beginning of 2026, you probably are now. As AI coding tools have become bet …

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You can now remix other people’s YouTube Shorts with AI

2026-05-20T12:41:40-04:00

Google announced a new YouTube Shorts Remix feature that lets users restyle clips or even insert themselves into other people's videos using Gemini Omni. Now, at the bottom of a YouTube Short, when you click the remix icon, you'll see an option to "reimagine" it. Here, you can prompt Gemini to turn a video into pixel art, an anime, or a found-footage horror film. But, beyond that, you can also alter the contents by, say, inflating heads, inserting background actors, dressing people in pirate costumes, or even putting yourself in the clip.

Creators can enable or disable the ability to reimagine videos. So, if you upload a short of your kids …

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It’s make or break time for AI labeling systems

2026-05-20T10:35:00-04:00

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If robust AI labeling was in place when these swagged out images of Pope Francis went viral, it may have been easier for people to tell they were fake. | Image: via Reddit

We're about to find out if the systems designed to make deepfakes and AI-generated content easy to spot are actually up to snuff. SynthID and C2PA Content Credentials, two distinct technologies for invisibly tagging image, video, and audio files with information about their origins, are getting their biggest expansion to date, and with it, the opportunity to turn the tide against unlabeled AI fakery that's deceiving people online.

Yesterday during its I/O conference, Google announced that the ability to verify whether images carry SynthID markers - the invisible watermarking system that's applied to content generated by Google AI models - i …

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If Google can’t make AI agents useful, maybe no one can

2026-05-20T10:02:58-04:00

For years, tech companies have promised AI will give everyone a capable personal assistant but delivered something more like a clueless intern. Over the past six months, that has started to change, thanks largely to the viral open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw. And among the top AI labs now chasing similar success, one seems particularly well-poised to make agents succeed at a large scale: Google.

At I/O 2026, Google announced new AI agents for gathering information, planning events, summarizing your inbox and calendar, and more. The agents can run continuously in the background, and the company claims they'll seamlessly integrate into …

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Android 17 is getting its own version of Apple’s Handoff

2026-05-20T07:07:33-04:00

At launch, Continue On will only allow you to move tasks from a phone to a tablet. | Image: Google

Google is adding a new Android feature that resembles Apple's Handoff, allowing you to start a task on your Android phone and continue it right where you left off from a compatible tablet.

"Continue On" is designed to eventually be bidirectional, but Google says that at launch it will only support tasks moving from a smartphone to a tablet. Android tablet users will see the Continue On icon in the dock suggesting the most recently used app from their phone, assuming it's also installed on the tablet.

It should allow Android users to directly open documents they were working on, or jump straight into the email they just had open. In some c …

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