I/O 2019 Day 1 highlights: From finding answers to getting things done, what's new at Google?
Here's a round-up of everything announced on the first day at Google I/O 2019.
By ET CONTRIBUTORS | Updated:
Agencies
By Sreeraman Thiagarajan
Google's annual developer conference I/O 2019 at Mountain View, California, kicked off with CEO Sundar Pichai calling out its mission of organising the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. While that is still relevant 21 years after the company was founded, Sundar's Google now wants to go from a company that helps people find answers, to a company that get things done.
Sundar's clique is on a quest to building a more helpful Google for everyone. To that effect, Search, the first most useful Google product is now enhanced to display Podcast, AR, 3D results, and 'full coverage'.
Full coverage is a search upgrade for news results that gives wide views on a story (e.g black hole or Brexit) and presents in a timeline format.
Podcasts are now indexed and shown as part of Google search, it can even be played right there or added to playlist to listen later. This is a big and much warranted move in a world where Google Assistant is at the centre of action.
Google search with support for AR based 3D results are immersive and impressive. It can show how a product or thing looks in three dimensions, and even lets you place the AR results on user's environment such as desktop. We saw an AR based great white shark come alive virtually on stage!
Google search is now complete with both inputs and outputs in form of text, audio, and image (camera).
Duplex on web: Last I/O we saw Google's Duplex (a bot) calling and conversing with restaurants and salons to book appointments. Now it has evolved into a web product as well. It can completely handle an end to end booking a car rental or help user shop online on a site that's not in English.
The Assistant powered Duplex is a huge step in Google's bet to 'get things done'.
A way better Assistant that's hyper fast: Google wants you to think touch and type on phone as redundant, slow and old school. With their advanced breakthrough in speech recognition users can now give back to back instruction to phone. Starting from in app navigation to searching and sending a photo in SMS, Assistant can do it all with voice.
Assistant is getting way too many enhancements such as 'picks for you' where a Google Home device with cameras reads your face and shows relevant information without infringing privacy, since the recognition happens on device and not on cloud. It is also getting support for personalised question like 'navigate me to mum's place'
Auto Delete, enhanced user privacy: Google has made it much easier for users' to be forgotten by it, the privacy controls now come with auto delete feature where user control how long their information stayed backed up on its servers.
All things AI: Google has some thoughtful use cases for using Voice augmented by AI; such as Live Captioning on videos, Live Translation named 'Project Euphonia, for people with difficultly in speech.
With Federated Learning, Google is pushing Machine Learning to user's phone than uploading users' data to its servers. A big step in privacy protection.
The world's most used mobile OS goes dark: Android Q has a bunch of new improvements and changes, but one that got entire audience excited was the Dark Theme. The battery saving-easy-on eye dark mode that's now all the rage.
Q has on-device learning for better privacy, gives more options to user on how they want to share location permissions and more.
Android Q also packs in better parenting control and takes a notch on digital well-being by introducing focus mode where users can toggle notifications on and off selectively between apps.
Google Hub is now Next Hub: The smart speaker with a 10 inch screen gets new name and features. It can do face match to identify who in the family is conversing with the device. It packs in standard Nest defaults like motion sensor. The camera has a physical button that can be turned off to ensure total privacy.
Cheaper Pixel, but only by price: Google admitted that it wants to solve the high price point problem in premium smartphones and pegs Pixel 3A at $399. It has standard hardware and software but adding AI to camera and battery makes it stand out even when compared to iPhone X, that's more than twice the price.
Pixel 3A comes in Just Black, Clearly White, and Purple-ish. All of them have a 3.5mm audio jack, and goes on sale starting today in most countries, and by 15th May in India.
Google AI for a better tomorrow: Jeff Dean, who heads Google's AI, along with his colleague Dr. Lily Peng shared some profound applications of AI including diagnosing diabetic retinopathy, and early stage lung cancer that even trained oncologist miss identifying when they look at regular CT scans.
Developer keynote, which immediately follows the main keynote, was coined by Thomas Kurian, the new CEO of Google cloud. New productivity enhancing announcements surrounding features of Android Q, and Chrome, Firebase were made that were much warranted by the developer community.
The main keynote ended with a sign off from Jeff Dean who called out the renewed mission at Google. "Building a more helpful Google for everyone"
(The author is co-founder at Agrahyah Technologies and a listed Google Developer Expert. He was in California at the invitation of Google to attend the annual developer conference I/O 2019)
Google's annual developer conference I/O 2019 at Mountain View, California, kicked off with CEO Sundar Pichai calling out its mission of organising the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. While that is still relevant 21 years after the company was founded, Sundar's Google now wants to go from a company that helps people find answers, to a company that get things done.
Sundar's clique is on a quest to building a more helpful Google for everyone. To that effect, Search, the first most useful Google product is now enhanced to display Podcast, AR, 3D results, and 'full coverage'.
Full coverage is a search upgrade for news results that gives wide views on a story (e.g black hole or Brexit) and presents in a timeline format.
Podcasts are now indexed and shown as part of Google search, it can even be played right there or added to playlist to listen later. This is a big and much warranted move in a world where Google Assistant is at the centre of action.
Pixel 3a was unveiled at the 2019 Google I/O event today. The Pixel 3a came with major upgrades from its predecessor. The new smartphone sports a better camera, a smarter Google Assistant and also has Digital well-being features.
Here's a sneak peak into the specifications of Google's Pixel 3a.
Google search with support for AR based 3D results are immersive and impressive. It can show how a product or thing looks in three dimensions, and even lets you place the AR results on user's environment such as desktop. We saw an AR based great white shark come alive virtually on stage!
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Google search is now complete with both inputs and outputs in form of text, audio, and image (camera).
Duplex on web: Last I/O we saw Google's Duplex (a bot) calling and conversing with restaurants and salons to book appointments. Now it has evolved into a web product as well. It can completely handle an end to end booking a car rental or help user shop online on a site that's not in English.
The Assistant powered Duplex is a huge step in Google's bet to 'get things done'.
A way better Assistant that's hyper fast: Google wants you to think touch and type on phone as redundant, slow and old school. With their advanced breakthrough in speech recognition users can now give back to back instruction to phone. Starting from in app navigation to searching and sending a photo in SMS, Assistant can do it all with voice.
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Assistant is getting way too many enhancements such as 'picks for you' where a Google Home device with cameras reads your face and shows relevant information without infringing privacy, since the recognition happens on device and not on cloud. It is also getting support for personalised question like 'navigate me to mum's place'
Auto Delete, enhanced user privacy: Google has made it much easier for users' to be forgotten by it, the privacy controls now come with auto delete feature where user control how long their information stayed backed up on its servers.
ADVERTISEMENT
All things AI: Google has some thoughtful use cases for using Voice augmented by AI; such as Live Captioning on videos, Live Translation named 'Project Euphonia, for people with difficultly in speech.
With Federated Learning, Google is pushing Machine Learning to user's phone than uploading users' data to its servers. A big step in privacy protection.
The world's most used mobile OS goes dark: Android Q has a bunch of new improvements and changes, but one that got entire audience excited was the Dark Theme. The battery saving-easy-on eye dark mode that's now all the rage.
Q has on-device learning for better privacy, gives more options to user on how they want to share location permissions and more.
Android Q also packs in better parenting control and takes a notch on digital well-being by introducing focus mode where users can toggle notifications on and off selectively between apps.
Google Hub is now Next Hub: The smart speaker with a 10 inch screen gets new name and features. It can do face match to identify who in the family is conversing with the device. It packs in standard Nest defaults like motion sensor. The camera has a physical button that can be turned off to ensure total privacy.
Cheaper Pixel, but only by price: Google admitted that it wants to solve the high price point problem in premium smartphones and pegs Pixel 3A at $399. It has standard hardware and software but adding AI to camera and battery makes it stand out even when compared to iPhone X, that's more than twice the price.
Pixel 3A comes in Just Black, Clearly White, and Purple-ish. All of them have a 3.5mm audio jack, and goes on sale starting today in most countries, and by 15th May in India.
Google AI for a better tomorrow: Jeff Dean, who heads Google's AI, along with his colleague Dr. Lily Peng shared some profound applications of AI including diagnosing diabetic retinopathy, and early stage lung cancer that even trained oncologist miss identifying when they look at regular CT scans.
Developer keynote, which immediately follows the main keynote, was coined by Thomas Kurian, the new CEO of Google cloud. New productivity enhancing announcements surrounding features of Android Q, and Chrome, Firebase were made that were much warranted by the developer community.
The main keynote ended with a sign off from Jeff Dean who called out the renewed mission at Google. "Building a more helpful Google for everyone"
(The author is co-founder at Agrahyah Technologies and a listed Google Developer Expert. He was in California at the invitation of Google to attend the annual developer conference I/O 2019)
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
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