- Pixel 9 smartphones now have access to Gemini Live Astra capabilities
- Astra can answer questions related to what you see or what's on your device's screen
- The powerful AI tool is free, and it arrived on Samsung S25 devices yesterday
Google Pixel 9, 9 Pro, and 9a owners just got a huge free Gemini upgrade that adds impressive Astra capabilities to their smartphones.
As we reported yesterday (April 7), Gemini Visual AI capabilities have started to roll out for Samsung S25 devices, and now Pixel 9s are also getting the awesome features.
So what is Gemini Astra? Well, you can now launch Gemini Live and grant it access to your camera, and it can then chat about what you see as well as what's on your smartphone's screen.
Gemini Astra has been hinted at for a long time, and it's immensely exciting to get access to it via a free update.
You should see the option to access Gemini's Astra capabilities from the Gemini Live interface. If you don't have access yet, be patient, as it should be available to all Pixel 9 users in the coming days.
While I don't personally have access to a Google Pixel 9 to test Gemini Live's Astra prowess, my colleague and TechRadar's Senior AI Editor, Graham Barlow, does.
I asked him to test out Gemini Astra and give me his first impressions of the new Pixel 9 AI capabilities, and you can see what he made of it below.
Hands-on impressions with Pixel 9's new Gemini Astra capabilities
Excited by the news of this free update, I decided to try the new Astra capabilities on my Google Pixel 9.
Once you’re in Gemini Live you’ll notice two new icons at the bottom of the screen – a camera icon and a screen share icon.
Tap the camera icon and Gemini switches to a camera mode, showing you video of what your phone is looking at, but the Gemini Live icons remain at the bottom of the screen.
There’s also a camera reverse button, so you can get Gemini to look directly at you. I tapped that, and asked Gemini what it thought of my hair, to which it replied that my hair was “a lovely natural brown color”. Gee, thanks Gemini!
I tested Gemini Live with a few objects on my desk – a water bottle, a magazine, and a laptop, all of which it identified correctly and could tell me about. I pointed the phone at the window towards a fairly nondescript car park and asked Gemini which city I was in, and it instantly, and correctly, told me it was Bath, UK, because the architecture was quite distinctive, and there was a lot of greenery.
Gemini can’t use Google search while going live, so for now it’s great for brainstorming, chatting, coming up with ideas, or simply identifying what you’re looking at.
For example, it could chat with me about Metallica, and successfully identified the Kirk Hammett Funko Pop I’ve got on my desk, but it couldn’t go online and find out how much it would cost to buy.
The screen share icon comes up with a message prompting you to share the screen with Google, then when you say "Share screen" it puts a little Gemini window at the top of the screen that looks like the phone call window you get when you start to use your phone while you’re on a call.
As you start to interact with your phone the window minimizes even further into a tiny red time counter that counts how long you’ve been live for.
You can keep using your phone and talking to Gemini at the same time, so you could ask it, "What am I looking at?", and it will describe what’s on your phone screen, or "Where are my Bluetooth settings?", and it will tell you which parts of the Settings app to look in.
It’s pretty impressive. One thing it can’t do, though, is interact with your phone in any way, so if you ask it to take you to the Bluetooth settings it can’t do it, but it will tell you what to tap to get you there.
Overall I’m impressed by how well Gemini Live works in both of these new modes. We’ve had features like Google Lens that can use your camera like this for a while now, but having it all inside the Gemini app is way more convenient. It’s fast, it bug-free, and it just works.
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