Astra 6 Review

Astra is designed around a different question from the frontier reasoning models, and judging it against them misses what it is for. It watches and listens continuously, holds context across a whole session of pointing a camera at things, and answers fast enough that the conversation never breaks. Nothing else does that as well. The integration across Google's own surfaces is the other real advantage: it reaches your calendar, your mail and your files without the ceremony of connecting anything, which is why it wins outright on the everyday repetitive work most people actually have.

Where it falls down is depth. Ask it to hold a genuinely hard chain of reasoning and it produces something fluent and shallow, and it does not reliably notice which of the two it has done. Coding is its weakest axis by a distance: it writes plausible code quickly and debugs poorly, abandoning a line of investigation as soon as the first fix fails. Judge it as an assistant and it is excellent. Judge it as a collaborator on difficult work and it is not close.