It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for all year: Google I/O Keynote Day! Google kicks off its developer conference every year with a rapid-fire series of announcements, including the reveal of many of the products it has recently been developing. Brian We’ve already started by sharing our expectations.
We know you don’t always have time to watch today’s entire two-hour presentation, so we’re going to take that and break the big news quickly as the keynotes are announced, all in a digestible, easy-to-understand way Browse the list. here we go!
Google Play
Google Play is getting some attention with new app discovery features, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools like the Google Play SDK Console, Play Integrity API, and more.
Of particular interest to developers is something called the Engage SDK, which will introduce a way for app makers to present their content to users in a personalized, full-screen, immersive experience tailored to them. However, Google said that this surface is currently not visible to users. read more
Detect fraud during calls
On Tuesday, Google previewed a feature it believes will alert users to potential scams during calls.
The feature, which will be built into future versions of Android, leverages Gemini Nano, the smallest version of Google’s generative AI products that runs entirely on the device. The system effectively monitors “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in real time.
Google gave an example of pretending to be a “bank representative.” Common scam tactics such as password requests and gift cards also trigger the system. These are all well-known ways to squeeze money out of you, but many people around the world are still vulnerable to these types of scams. Once launched, it pops up a notification that users may fall victim to an unsavory character. read more
Ask for photos
Google Photos is infusing artificial intelligence with the launch of an experimental feature called “Ask Photos,” powered by Google’s Gemini AI model. The new feature, launching later this summer, will allow users to search their Google Photos collection using natural language queries that leverage artificial intelligence’s understanding of their photo content and other metadata.
Although before users can search for specific people, places or things in photos, with the help of natural language processing, artificial intelligence upgrades will make finding the right content more intuitive and reduce the manual search process.
This example is also very cute. Who doesn’t love tiger stuffed animals and golden retriever band duo the Golden Stripes? read more
Everything about Gemini
Gemini 1.5 Professional Edition: Another upgrade that generates artificial intelligence is that Gemini can now analyze longer documents, code libraries, video and audio recordings than before.
In a private preview of a new version of the company’s current flagship model, the Gemini 1.5 Pro, it was revealed that it can hold up to 2 million tokens. This is double the previous maximum amount. With this level of performance, the new Gemini 1.5 Pro supports the largest input of any commercially available model. read more
Gemini Live: The company previewed a new experience in Gemini called Gemini Live, which allows users to have “deep” voice chats with Gemini on their smartphones. Users can interrupt Gemini while the chatbot is speaking to ask clarifying questions, and it will instantly adapt to their speech patterns. Gemini can see and react to the user’s surroundings through photos or videos captured by a smartphone’s camera.
At first glance, Live doesn’t appear to be a significant upgrade over existing technology. But Google claims it leverages new technologies in generative artificial intelligence to deliver superior, less error-prone image analysis, and combines these technologies with an enhanced speech engine to enable more consistent, emotionally expressive and authentic multi-turn conversations. read more
Gemini Nano: Now for a small announcement. Google has also built the smallest AI model Gemini Nano directly into the Chrome desktop client starting from Chrome 126. For example, Google itself plans to use this new feature to support features such as Workspace Lab’s existing “Help me write” tool in Gmail. read more
Gemini on Android: Google’s Gemini on Android is an artificial intelligence replacement for Google Assistant that will soon take advantage of its deep integration with the Android mobile operating system and Google apps. Users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps. Meanwhile, YouTube users will be able to click “Ask this video” to find specific information from a YouTube video, Google said. read more
Gemini on Google Maps: Starting from the Places API, the Gemini model function will be available on the Google Maps platform for developers to use. Developers can display generated AI summaries of places and regions in their apps and websites. These summaries are created based on Gemini’s insights from the Google Maps community of more than 300 million contributors. What’s better? Developers will no longer need to write their own custom location descriptions. read more
Tensor processing unit performance improved
Google has launched its next generation—sixth generation to be exact—Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) artificial intelligence chip. They’re called Trillium and will be launched later this year. If you remember, it has become a tradition at I/O conferences to announce next-generation TPUs, even though these chips are only launching later this year.
Compared with the fifth generation, the computing performance per chip of these new TPUs will be increased by 4.7 times. Perhaps more importantly, though, Trillium features third-generation SparseCore, which Google describes as “a purpose-built accelerator for handling very large embeds common in advanced ranking and recommendation workloads.” read more
Application of artificial intelligence in search
Google is adding more artificial intelligence to its search, easing concerns that the company is losing market share to rivals such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. The company is rolling out an AI-powered overview to U.S. users. read more
Google plans to use generative artificial intelligence to organize entire search results pages for certain searches. This complements the existing AI Overview feature, which creates a short snippet containing aggregated information about the topic you’re searching for. After some time in the Google AI Labs program, the AI Overview feature will be generally available on Tuesday. read more
Generative artificial intelligence upgrade
Google has announced the launch of Imagen 3, the latest in the tech giant’s Imagen family of generative artificial intelligence models.
Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind, said that compared with its predecessor Imagen 2, Imagen 3 can more accurately understand text prompts translated into images and is more “creative and detailed” than previous generations of products. In addition, the model produces fewer “noises” and errors, he said.
“This is [also] Our best model yet for rendering text, which is a challenge for image generation models. read more
Gemma 2 Update
Gemma 2 is Google’s next-generation Gemma model, which will be launched in June and has a 27 billion parameter model. read more
Project IDX
Project IDX, the company’s next-generation, AI-centric, browser-based development environment, is now in public beta. This update will integrate with Google Maps Platform into the IDE to help add geolocation capabilities to their applications, and with Chrome Dev Tools and Lighthouse to help debug applications. Soon, Google will also allow applications to be deployed to Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless platform for running front-end and back-end services. read more
I understand
Google is targeting OpenAI’s Sora with Veo, an artificial intelligence model that can create roughly a minute-long 1080p video clips based on text prompts. Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including landscapes and time-lapse footage, and edit and tweak the resulting footage.
It also builds on Google’s initial commercial work in video generation that it previewed in April, which leveraged the company’s Imagen 2 series of image generation models to create looping video clips. read more
Circle search
The AI-powered “Circle Search” feature, which allows Android users to use gestures such as spinning circles to get immediate answers, will now be able to solve more complex psychology and math word problems. It’s designed to make searching on Google more natural with actions like circling, highlighting, doodling, or clicking, from anywhere on your phone. Oh, and it’s best to help your children complete their homework directly through supported Android phones and tablets. read more
Firebase Genkit
The Firebase platform has added a new feature called Firebase Genkit, which is designed to make it easier for developers to use JavaScript/TypeScript to build artificial intelligence-driven applications, and support for Go will be launched soon. It is an open source framework, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.
Some of the use cases for Genkit highlighted by the company on Tuesday include many of the standard GenAI use cases: content generation and summarization, text translation and image generation. read more
Pixel 8a
Google couldn’t wait to show off the latest additions to the Pixel series at I/O, and last week announced the new Pixel 8a. The phone starts at $499 and ships on Tuesday. These updates are exactly what we’ve come to expect from these updates. First on the list is the addition of the Tensor G3 chip. read more
Pixel Slate
Google’s Pixel tablet (called the Slate) is now available. If you remember, Brian reviewed the Pixel tablet around the same time last year, and all he talked about was the base. Interestingly, the tablet can be used without it. read more
We will update this article throughout the day…
