By @CNET
Publication Date: 2026-05-20 22:25:00
On a balmy, 86-degree day in Mountain View, just outside Google’s sprawling campus, I sought refuge from the glaring California sun in a Volvo EX60 — or so I thought. The air conditioning wasn’t working.
To mitigate the heat even slightly, we opted to darken the transparent sunroof. And all we had to do was ask Gemini.
“Can you make the sunroof opaque?” Vivek Radhakrishnan, a technical program manager at Google, asked the car via voice command. Like magic, the electrochromic window stretching over us blocked the light beaming in from above. We didn’t have to rummage through the car’s settings to find the right button.
At Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday, I got an early look at a handful of new features coming to cars supporting Google Built-in and Android Auto. The upcoming capabilities, rolling out later this year, are designed to help you keep your eyes on the road while offering useful information. You can lean on Gemini AI to handle tasks like sharing your ETA,…
