Google I/O 2026 kicks off today at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, with a keynote at 10 AM Pacific. But Google has already shown most of its hand. Over the past week, through a pre-recorded Android Show and a series of strategic leaks, the company has revealed what amounts to the biggest product overhaul since it went AI-first in 2023.

The headlines: Chromebooks are dead, replaced by "Googlebooks" running a full Android-based desktop OS. Android itself gets an AI layer called Gemini Intelligence that operates across every app on your phone. Smart glasses powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro are coming from Samsung, Warby Parker, and others. And Android 17 arrives with features that suggest Google wants its AI to be the primary interface between you and your device.

Gemini Intelligence: AI That Lives Inside Android

The centerpiece is Gemini Intelligence, a suite of agentic AI features embedded directly into the Android operating system. This is not a chatbot you open in a separate app. This is an intelligence layer that runs underneath Android, understands screen context, and completes multi-step tasks autonomously across applications.

Google's demos showed the system finding a class syllabus in Gmail, identifying the required textbooks, and adding them to a shopping cart without the user switching between apps. Other features include Smart Autofill (Gemini populates form fields across Chrome and apps), Rambler (speech-to-text that removes filler words and restructures your dictation into coherent text), and Create My Widget (describe a widget in natural language, Gemini generates it on the spot, pulling from Gmail, Calendar, and web data).

If this works as described, it is a direct challenge to Apple's forthcoming AI-powered Siri reboot expected at WWDC in June. It is also a response to the agentic AI push from OpenAI, Anthropic, and every startup racing to build AI that does things rather than just talks about them. The EU is already preparing to force Google to open Android to rival AI assistants under the Digital Markets Act, which could complicate the strategy in Europe.

Googlebooks: Chromebook Is Dead, Long Live Android on the Desktop

Google has killed the Chromebook. Its replacement: Googlebooks, a new category of premium Android-powered laptops running "Aluminium OS," which is Android 17 rebuilt as a desktop operating system with a custom window manager, native multitasking, and Gemini embedded at the OS level.

Hardware partners include Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, with devices shipping this autumn. The standout feature is Magic Pointer, which turns the cursor into an AI agent that can perform actions on screen. Googlebooks will run Android apps natively and stream phone apps from a paired smartphone. This resolves a question that has lingered for over a decade: whether Google would merge Android and ChromeOS. The answer is yes, and Android won.

Android XR Glasses: Taking on Meta's 82% Market Share

Google will preview Android XR smart glasses at I/O. The glasses feature cameras, microphones, and speakers, with an optional in-lens display for contextual information. Gemini 2.5 Pro powers real-time translation, navigation, messaging, and visual understanding. Samsung, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and XREAL are all building hardware, suggesting Google is positioning Android XR as a platform play rather than a single product.

The competitive context: Meta has sold over 7 million Ray-Ban smart glasses and controls roughly 82% of the market. Apple, Google, and Snap are all preparing rival products with cameras, raising privacy concerns that the industry has not resolved since the original Google Glass backlash in 2013.

What to Watch at the Keynote

The keynote starts at 10 AM PT today. Most of the product announcements are already known, but two things remain uncertain: whether Google will unveil a new Gemini model (current leaks suggest Gemini 2.5 Ultra may still be weeks away), and whether Project Astra, Google's long-running multimodal AI assistant experiment, will finally get a consumer release date.

The strategic picture is clear. Google is betting that owning the AI layer on the world's most popular mobile OS gives it an advantage that no standalone chatbot company can match. If Gemini Intelligence delivers on even half of what the demos promise, it changes how two billion Android users interact with their devices. If it does not, Google just killed the Chromebook for nothing.

We will be covering the keynote live. Check back after 10 AM PT for full analysis of what Google actually ships versus what it demos on stage.