At its first Google I/O event since 2019, Google revealed a number of improvements to its developer offerings on Tuesday. Despite the fact that Google generates the majority of its money from advertising, the yearly event is a method for the company to thrill its developer community with upgrades ranging from software and artificial intelligence moonshots to shopping services. Due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the firm cancelled its annual developer conference last year. The event this year was primarily virtual, with a few in-person guests at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Here’s a rundown of some of the more noteworthy announcements from the day’s proceedings:
Hardware
This year’s event was short on hardware announcements, with no major unveilings or updates to Google’s Pixel phones or smart speakers. However, it did announce certain changes to current items. Most significantly, Google said that it now has a massive 3 billion active Android smartphones worldwide, far outnumbering Apple’s estimate of 1 billion iPhones. However, Android devices differ greatly in terms of the platform version the company runs, with some relying only on the core open-source code and others dependent on modified apps and skins distributed by hardware manufacturers and carriers. The firm unveiled its new operating system upgrade, Android 12, which works on a 22 percent reduction in server CPU time, ultimately meaning “basically, everything is faster,” according to Google’s Vice President of Android and Google Play, Sameer Samat. Google officials announced a collaboration between Wear, Google’s wearable tech software platform, and Samsung’s Tizen software. It will try to simplify the smartwatch OS for the Android platform, as well as increase load speeds and battery life.
The business also stated that a YouTube Music app for Wear OS will be out later this year. Fitbit CEO James Park stated that Google Wear will contain popular Fitbit features such as monitoring healthy progress, with plans for more functions. Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, finally concluded its $2.1 billion acquisition of the fitness-tracking business in January, after authorities waited more than a year to approve the deal. “In the future, we will be producing premium smart watches based on Wear that combine the best of Fitbit’s healthcare expertise with Google’s ambient computing capabilities,” Park added, alluding to Google’s goal of putting computers in every area.
Purchasing
In order to compete with Amazon, the corporation unveiled a few improvements to its e-commerce drive. The firm announced a strengthened relationship with Shopify, allowing the firm’s more than 1 million merchants to make their items more discoverable in Google Search and other places. It will make it possible for Shopify businesses to appear in Google Search, Maps, Lens, Images, and YouTube with “only a few clicks.” On the announcement, Shopify’s shares rose as much as 4%. Separately, the corporation announced the following e-commerce enhancements: For example, when users open new tabs on Google Chrome, their shopping carts are continuously displayed, allowing them to return to shopping later.
Technology for collaboration
Google also announced several improvements to its Workplace tools to make cooperation simpler. During the epidemic, the industry, which includes Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack, witnessed an increase in usage. A new tool in Workspace dubbed smart canvas will allow users to tag other users in documents and the call through Google Meet, its video platform, immediately from a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. The business also demonstrated an early research project dubbed Project Starline, which creates a 3D representation of a person that may be utilised for meeting dialogues. It looks to be a holographic conversation. Project Starline is in in its early phases, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, although some staff have been testing it as part of attempts to coordinate between disparate sites during the epidemic. Later this year, it intends to do trial deployments with enterprise partners.
Artificial intelligence
Google’s most well-known product is its artificial intelligence engine, which drives everything from Search to self-driving vehicles. According to executives, it is becoming increasingly smarter. Pichai announced LaMDA, a breakthrough in natural language processing that promises to make conversations and searches more natural while answering more open-ended inquiries. Pichai used the example of a person having a discussion with the planet Pluto, which provided answers to the user’s inquiries about it. Execs also revealed MUM, a “Multitask Unified Model” that they claim is 1,000 times more powerful than the BERT model that powers Google Search. MUM, which claims to be able to answer sophisticated questions about what a user could be thinking by pulling data from texts, photos, and videos, claims to be able to answer complicated questions about what a user could be thinking.
Google also announced the opening of its first quantum computing campus. The Quantum AI complex in Santa Barbara, California, contains a data centre, research labs, and its own quantum processor chip production facilities. According to the business, “these new computational capabilities will assist to expedite the discovery of better batteries, energy-efficient fertilisers, and tailored treatments, as well as enhanced optimization, new AI architectures, and more.” Google’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo, a former Obama administration official who joined the firm in 2019, revealed during her inaugural Google I/O that the firm is assisting in the development of a gadget that utilises AI to diagnose skin disorders. It will deliver a diagnostic of various dermatological conditions once users upload three distinct photographs of skin, hair, or nail concerns and complete certain questions. According to DeSalvo, the product would be available through web browsers and will cover 288 conditions, including 90 percent of the most frequently searched derm-related topics on Google. It will be offered to customers in the European Union for the first time by the end of the year, she added.
