Google starts rolling out Gemini Live's Astra vision features

Remember Google's Project Astra demo, where the AI casually spotted a pair of glasses across a room and read code off a whiteboard? That sci-fi vision is finally trickling into the hands of real users.

Following its promise at MWC earlier this month, Google has officially kicked off the rollout of Project Astra-powered visual capabilities inside Gemini Live on Android.

Giving Gemini Eyes on Your Phone and World

Reports are starting to surface from Android users who noticed a major upgrade after summoning the Gemini overlay.

Sitting right above the familiar screenshot suggestion chip is a brand new button: "Share screen with Live".

Once tapped, Gemini begins watching your entire mobile display in real time. For now, you have to share the whole screen, as single-app sharing isn't an option yet.

Alongside screen sharing, the real-time camera feed is also going live. By pulling up the full Gemini Live interface, users can launch a continuous camera stream to ask questions about the physical world, complete with a quick-switch toggle for the selfie camera in the bottom-right corner.

Google is also pairing this with a phone call-style system notification and a cleaner, more compact fullscreen UI.

A Xiaomi Phone Got It First

Oddly enough, the first confirmed sighting didn't come from a Google Pixel.

Back in January, Google claimed Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S25 owners would be among the first in line for Astra features. Yet the Reddit user who spotted it was running a Xiaomi phone.

That suggests Google isn't placing artificial hardware walls in front of other Android makers, provided the phone has enough horsepower.

The real gate is the subscription. Astra features are strictly reserved for Gemini Advanced subscribers, which means paying for the Google One AI Premium plan starting at $19.99 a month.

iPhone owners will have to wait on the sidelines. Google hasn't detailed iOS availability, and iOS users are still waiting on basic Gemini Live features like discussing photos, files, and YouTube clips.

Why it matters

This marks a shift from reactive text boxes to proactive, continuous spatial context.

For everyday Android users, having an assistant that looks at your screen or what is in front of your camera cuts out the tedious cycle of taking screenshots, uploading photos, and typing prompts. It turns troubleshooting an app or asking about a physical gadget into a casual conversation.

Should you upgrade immediately? We think it is smarter to wait. At $20 a month, paying upfront for an extremely limited staggered rollout is a gamble, and we still need to see how badly sustained video streaming drains phone batteries.

For the broader AI race, Google is leveraging its greatest moat: OS integration. While OpenAI showed off similar multimodal live demos months ago, delivering system-wide screen sharing and camera feeds directly inside Android gives Google a distribution speed OpenAI cannot match without hardware partners.

Google's choice to not restrict Astra to Pixel is clever for subscription growth. But shipping screen sharing without granular app-level privacy controls looks like a clear blind spot. Users will hesitate to let an AI watch everything if an incoming text or banking alert can get swept up in the video feed.