Gemini Spark: Google's always-on agent lives in the cloud
What was announced?
According to reporting by TechCrunch, Google introduced Gemini Spark at I/O 2026. Spark is an always-on agentic assistant built from Gemini 3.5 and Google’s Antigravity agent harness. You hand it work by emailing a dedicated Gmail address. It then runs around the clock on Google Cloud virtual machines and reports back as it makes progress. At launch it is available to AI Ultra subscribers.
The pitch is an assistant that does not wait in a chat window. It holds your tasks, keeps working while you are away, and lives where your email lives.
What does it mean for personal, on-device writing?
Notice the direction of travel. Model efficiency keeps pushing capable AI toward phones. The flagship assistant products are moving the opposite way: deeper into the cloud, closer to your accounts, with more standing access to your data.
Spark is the clearest example yet. To be useful, it works inside your email. To act for you, it drafts in your name from a datacenter. That is the cost of an assistant that knows you in the cloud: a third party’s machines hold your correspondence, your tasks, and a working model of how you write, attached to your account.
For some jobs, that trade may be worth it. But it is a trade, and it should be named as one. “An AI that knows you” is becoming the product everyone sells. The open question is what it should cost in privacy.
Where does ILURA stand?
Spark is the philosophical opposite of ILURA. That makes it a useful mirror.
ILURA’s answer to an AI that knows you is to keep the knowing on the phone. Your role playbooks, your corrections, your learned style live on your iPhone and are processed by Apple Intelligence on the device. There is no account to attach them to. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected.
The honest flip side: ILURA cannot do what Spark does. It will not watch an inbox, run overnight, or act on its own. It writes when you ask — in the app, through Siri, the Share Sheet, or Shortcuts — and then it stops. Two products, one question: what should an AI that knows you cost in privacy? Spark and ILURA are the two ends of the answer.
Read the signal through ILURA
Platform news matters when it changes what users expect from personal AI. ILURA reads these shifts through one lens: private agents trained by the user on iPhone.
- What becomes possible?
- What should stay user-controlled?
- What belongs on device?
Try it now
Put this to work on a real message.
Open ILURA, bring in a message you actually need to handle today, and get it done in your voice — free, on device, no account. It learns the preference, so the behavior carries to the next one.
Free to start · No account · Data Not CollectedQuick answers
- What is Gemini Spark?
- According to TechCrunch, Gemini Spark is Google's always-on agentic assistant. It pairs Gemini 3.5 with the Antigravity harness, takes tasks through a dedicated Gmail address, and runs around the clock on Google Cloud VMs, initially for AI Ultra subscribers.
- Is ILURA an agent like Gemini Spark?
- No. ILURA agents are private, user-invoked and human-reviewed. They help when you ask, on your iPhone, through the app, Siri, the Share Sheet, or Shortcuts. Nothing runs in the background, and your text stays on the device.