I Chatted With Google's Lifesize, Hyperreal AI Companion - CNET

Our gifting experts are obsessively searching for holiday gifts that are unique, thoughtful and suitable for any budget. Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. The video agent demoed as part of Google Beam is an experiment, and it's shockingly realistic. Is this a helper, or a replacement for people? Google Beam just got an experimental video AI agent. I don’t know what its name is. Oh and that’s an AI generated image of my cameraman and myself in the room. Sitting down in a comfortably air-conditioned booth in the overheated outdoor demo landscape at Google I/O this week, I had a pleasant and uncanny chat with a smiling person who wasn’t actually there. Nor were they even a real human being. The booth was a demo setup of Google Beam, a large-screen camera-studded telepresence video screen device. As we talked eye to eye, it all felt shockingly real. I’ve experienced Google Beam demos before, back when it was called Project Starline: with actual humans on the other end, in holographic glasses-free 3D. This was a whole new twist, and while the demo was 2D