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Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage Wednesday at the company's annual developer conference at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. As expected, his announcements were more incremental than revolutionary. They represent Pichai's doubling down on his successful bet, which began a year ago, to put AI at the forefront of everything Google does. Google's AI-first vision has been paying many dividends, Pichai said. "We are driving it forward across all of our products and platforms," he said. There was plenty of interesting new technology, new services like Google Lens and even new tools to help job seekers. "I believe we are on the verge of solving some of the most important problems we face," Pichai said, ending the keynote with his trademark optimism.
Here are the highlights of all the Google I/O announcements:
- Google Lens -- a set of vision-based services that identifies objects. Point your camera at a sign, a flower, an object, and your device will automatically identify what it is seeing. Point it to a wifi bar code, and it will automatically log you into that network.
- Google Assistant interfaces -- you can now type into Google Assistant, or feed it inputs from Google Lens (ie, images). Demo: Point your camera at a menu in Japanese -- Google Lens captures the image, Google Translate translates to English, and then you can ask Assistant to show you images of the menu items; support for French, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese coming soon to Assistant; Italian and other languages later this year.
- Google Assistant devices -- it is now available on the iPhone as an app, posing a direct challenge to Apple's Siri; Google made it easier for makers of speakers, toys or other devices to incorporate the Google Assistant (stay tuned for device announcements ahead of the holidays).
- Cloud TPUs, or Cloud Tensor Processing Units (Google's AI chip), bringing AI capabilities to Google Cloud customers. More on Cloud TPUs here.
- Google is bringing all of its AI services under one roof at Google.ai, including research, tools and applied AI
- Google's AI-driven "smart replies" are now available on Gmail.
- AI-driven face recognition in Google Photos is now performing better than humans at recognizing people.
- Google Home updates -- proactive assistance that gives you info you need before you ask for it; hands free calling to US and Canada lines for free ("hey Google, call mom"); adds Soundcloud and Deezer, to existing music services like Spotify and others; new TV "casting" partners like HBO Now, Hulu and others; ability to beam content to other screens -- send directions to your phone with a simple "let's go" command and send your calendar or weather report to your TV.
- Google Photos updates -- "suggested sharing" will propose who you might want to send some photos to, using AI to recognize the people in them; "shared libraries" so you don't have to share individual photos or albums with close friends or family members; Google embraces print images with incredibly easy to produce photo books; Google Lens helps you identify images in your library.
- YouTube -- 360 videos are now easier to watch on your TV, which is where YouTube is growing fastest; enhancements to paid "Super Chat" service, which allows fan to communicate with and pay content creators;
- Android - there are now 2 billion active Android devices; and Android O will have a boatload of updates, small and large, including on-device AI capabilities, better copy and paste, improved notifications, better security (Google Play Protect), faster boot and faster apps. (Forbes is embracing Android's new capabilities with its new Progressive Web App.)
- Daydream VR -- new VR platform/devices from Lenovo and HTC are coming later this year; better tracking capabilities, and a handful of new smartphones like the Samsung S8 now work with the Daydream platform.
- Google for Jobs – using our products to help people find jobs; in partnership with LinkedIn, Monster, Career Builder and others, Google is bringing the power of its search engine to help job seekers – rolling out in the US in the coming weeks.
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