Here Are the Biggest Announcements from Google I/O

Google has kicked off its annual I/O developer conference at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.Google just wrapped up its 2018 I/O keynote on Day 1.It is setting the scene for what it expects to be one of the big themes of the event: artificial intelligence. AI was a big theme throughout. The big announcements started and just kept coming. Here we go….

Google AI

Google is setting the scene for what it expects to be one of the big themes of the event: artificial intelligence. Today, the company rebranded the whole of its Google Research division as Google AI, with the old Google Research site now directing to a newly expanded Google AI site.

The move signals how Google has increasingly focused R&D on computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks.

Talk to assistant more natural

Google announced a major update to the Google Assistant. The main idea here is to allow you to have more natural conversations with the Google Assistant. Google calls this feature “continued conversation” and it’ll roll out in the coming week .And coming up with 6 new voices including that of singer John Legend. The new voices will be included in phones and home speakers, of course.

Your Assistant can book appointments for you

Ushering in a cyberutopia or cyberhell, the Google Assistant is now capable of calling a local business’s phone number and talking on the phone like a human being, booking appointments for you in the background.

Photo tricks

Google can now edit and tweak old photos automatically using an AI database powered by billions of images online. That means the stuff you add to Google Photos can be automatically cropped, rotated, color-corrected, have their brightness adjusted, and so on. And for black-and-white photos, Google can now colorize them, though your mileage may vary.Google, at its heart, is a search company — and it needs a lot of data to get visual search right.

Smart displays coming with Assistant ad YouTube

Users are increasingly getting accustomed to the idea of some smart device sitting in their living room that will answer their questions.Here comes Google’s Smart Displayswill be powered by will be powered by Google Assistant and YouTube and coming up with an option to have some kind of visual display for actions that just can’t be resolved with a voice interface that will launch in July.

Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps

Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps, available on iOS and Android this summer. The addition is meant to provide better recommendations to users. The maps integration also combines the camera, computer vision technology, and Google Maps with Street View.Instead of walking a few paces and checking which way the blue dot moves on Google Maps, you’ll soon be able to use your camera in combination with Street View data to figure out which way you need to go.

Google News gets a redesign

Google News is getting a redesign powered by AI (sure) to help inform users.The AI-powered, redesigned news destination app will “allow users to keep up with the news they care about, understand the full story, and enjoy and support the publishers they trust.” It will leverage elements found in Google’s digital magazine app, Newsstand and YouTube, and introduces new features like “newscasts” and “full coverage” to help people get a summary or a more holistic view of a news story.

So when will you be able to actually play with all these new features?

Android P Beta is available today

There was plenty of talk about Android P at today’s big I/O kickoff — but when can you actually download the thing? Right now, as a matter of fact, if you’ve got one of a handful of compatible handsets.
The new version of the operating system includes a number of visual upgrades, a change over the Oreo’s additions, which were largely in the backend. There are also some key new gesture based functions, putting Android more inline with recent updates to iOS for the iPhone X and the new Adaptive Battery feature, which gets more juice out of existing hardware by throttling power on under used apps.