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Thursday 18 May 2017

Google I/O 17 SL, by Mobitel - Google IO Keynote Speech

We kick off the keynote to a quick animation, that outlines all of Google's Projects.

Without further ado, out comes Sundar Pichai. A couple of minutes of mandatorily plugging Google later, he gets into the real body of the Event.

To start off with, he casually announces a new service to be added to Google Mail. Smart Reply will be able to learn from you, and quickly allow you to reply to emails with a message-based experience.

The next big announcement is Google Lens, which is basically an integration of Google's myriad services with vision as an input device.

Coming on next, we have a kind of TPU, which is basically an upgrade to proceessing units. Offering significant upgrades to power and speed for the specific purpose of making computers more amenable to AI.

An announcement for developers - The Google Assistant SDK will be out for developers to integrate into their own solutions.

With Actions on Google now on mobile phones. we could be looking at a whole overhaul of how phones fundamentally work. It may not be a replacement of the app paradigm just yet, but it is coming pretty close.

Next up, updates to Photos. Smart sharing's now a feature. Google will now find pictures in your device. and suggest you share them with the people in them. Sounds simple; isn't.

As expected, Google Lens will be integrated with Google Photos, integrating computer vision with the capability to analyse images.

As for updates to Youtube. I'm not too impressed technically. The idea of "Superchats" is Youtube assigning a process and a name to an already existing process, which, while not too revolutionary, is definitely a great thing to see.

Moving on to the next section - Android. Picture-in-Picture, like Superchats before it, isn't really anything new, BUT is in fact something that many a user has definitely wished for before.

The upgrades to notification dots? Smart Selection? Vitals? More of the same. Streamlining of an already existing process to improve an existing user experience is something that can never go unappreciated.

A couple of big announcements for Android Devs, Kotlin is now an official language compatible with Android. With improvements to their profiling tools, and the Dashboard, where an Android app can be analysed and top issues can be highlighted. Also coming is the beta release of Android O, although it's only out for an extremely limited set of devices.

As a person that struggled with an Samsung S Duos for two years, Android Go seems like a great feature. It's nice to know persons with low-end phones will not be left behind.

Finally, there is Gboard, which integrates translation services and phonetic typing into a single keyboard, something which I, as a multilingual person, personally like very much. No more struggling with different keyboard layouts.

"Great momentum with apps, more Daydream-ready phones, and a standalone headset coming leater this year." Quick summary about VR from the presenter himself.

Moving on to AR, I find that the most interesting idea here is VPS (Visual Positioning System). It could be incredibly helpful to the visually impaired, and even just to people looking to navigate an area.

As an undergraduate looking to enter the job market, I find the idea of being able to find open job postings right through Google Search to be really interesting.

Looking at the keynote, it's clear that the future from scifi movies isn't so far off.

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