Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the hundreds, as friends and families desperately searched for their missing loved ones. But while some were rewarded with tearful reunions, others weren't so lucky. Over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed. The grim work following a disaster remains--surveying rubble and ash, distinguishing a piece of plastic from a tiny fragment of bone--but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace swifter than ever before.

On Tuesday, Google announced its own new tools, including a conversational assistant called Gemini Live, which can do many of the same things. It also revealed that it's building a sort of "do-everything" AI agent, which is currently in development but will not be released until later this year. Soon you'll be able to explore for yourself to gauge whether you'll turn to these tools in your daily routine as much as their makers hope, or whether they're more like a sci-fi party trick that eventually loses its charm. Here's what you should know about how to access these new tools, what you might use them for, and how much it will cost. What it's capable of: The model can talk with you in real time, with a response delay of about 320 milliseconds, which OpenAI says is on par with natural human conversation.