Google I/O 2018 conference: The 7 biggest announcements that you need to know

Google introduced new products and technology upgrades at its annual developer conference on May 8 that showed the Internet giant lagging behind Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc in some areas while driving home its superiority in artificial intelligence.

1. Robot calling human

The feature that got the most attention on the first day of the I/O developer show was called Duplex. It’s part of the Google Assistant, a voice-controlled system that answers questions and performs an increasing array of tasks on command. It competes with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. A demonstration on stage showed Google’s Assistant calling small businesses to book appointments.

A Google executive asked the system to make a restaurant reservation and when a human there picked up the phone, the software discussed different times, the number of seats and other details with the unsuspecting employee. Duplex is launching as an experiment soon, the company said. Google Assistant also is getting some new voices, including musician John Legend’s.

2. Gmail will write your emails

Duplex relies on AI, a type of software that learns automatically from data, rather than having to be hand-coded. Google has been developing machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding and other forms of AI for at least a decade and is considered a leader in the field. AI powers many of the other new products and features Google showed off on Tuesday, including Smart Compose for Gmail. This technology predicts the next words or phrases as people type an email. It takes Gmail a step further beyond Smart Replies, a feature from a few years ago which suggests appropriate responses to emails.

3. A new AI chip

Google introduced version 3.0 of its Tensor Processor Unit, a chipset designed in-house for handling all these data-heavy AI tasks. The new version is eight times more powerful than last year’s and it is water-cooled rather than air-cooled. Older TPUs are available for outside companies to rent through Google’s cloud-computing business. But for now, only Google gets to use the latest version.

4. AR navigation in Maps

A couple of useful features have also come with Google Maps. Google Maps is being turned into a more social platform. The users will be able to coordinate with their friends from within the application’s interface to choose among a variety of places. Apart from this, Google Map has also integrated Augmented Reality navigation on the screen. The users will now just be able to point their cameras towards a road or any street and Google will take help from the Street View data to give you AR directions on the go.

5. Google Photos

Google announced big upgrades to its Photos app, including the ability for AI algorithms to suggest who to share shots with based on who is in the picture. Google Maps will be able to take cues from machine learning and artificial intelligence, using it for more realistic image processing. Google Maps will now be able to colorize a black and white photo, if you have one from the retro times, and edit it to perfection for you.

6. Google Assistant

The tech giant’s AI Google Assistant is also getting a revamp. According to the new update, Google is adding as much as six new voice datasets to the Assistant’s database. Among one of the six new voices that have been introduced on top of the original voice of Holly, one is of John Legend, the famous American singer. Moreover, Google has made the voices more realistic and has added the support for continued conversation for a more human-like experience. Ability to ask multiple questions is also being added.

7. Android P

One of the most important announcements that came on this year’s developer’s conference was definitely related to Google’s mobile operating system Android P. Although we have covered this niche in detail, here is a brief recap. Features have been added to make the smartphone a bit smarter. Machine learning is extensively being used to learn from user behavior and drive the smartphone processes. Adaptive Brightness and Adaptive Battery are a couple of such features that take help from user’s usage patterns to set the display’s brightness and enhance the smartphone’s battery life respectively.

A special focus has also been put on making the users more aware of their smartphone usages. A special dashboard has been added which provides important information about how used your smartphone over a specific time frame, what applications did you use and for how long.