Google I/O 2019 - Day 1

Google I/O 2019 is upon us. This is Google's annual conference and their chance to tell the world about what's new and amazing from Google. Here's a brief summary of what I heard on day 1 of the #io19.

Google News

The Google News app will soon begin to index the audio from podcasts. This means you'll be able to search for content in a richer way. Search results will not only look for the title of podcasts but also search the full content of the podcast. Super useful for content discovery.

Camera in search

Search is improving all the time and now we can use the camera in your phone for searching in more engaging and interesting ways. When you search for New Balance sneakers/trainers you will see a 3D render of the shoe and can place the shoe, using AR, next to your clothes and see if their match. Nice!

Google Lens improvement

Google Lens is a great tool, built in the camera app of millions of Android phones. Now, with Google Lens, you can do a whole bunch of new things, such as taking a photo of a restaurant menu and it'll highlight popular dishes as well as show you photos of all those dishes so you can see what the food looks like before you order it. Lip smackin', finger licking good! It gets better. Take a photo of the receipt and lens will automatically work out the tip and and even let you split the bill between your friends. Now, if you take a photo of a recipe, not only will you get search results for that recipe but you'll get video tutorials made possible through a growing set of partners.

Google Go

Google's massively expanding how that enable people in emerging economies with low power phones to access content and provide genuinely useful services for the disadvantaged in society. For example, a new service called Google Go will work on lower powered, cheap Android phones enabling users to take photos of public signs that will enable illiterate people to understand what the sign says but reading it out to them in English or their native language. It'll even overlay the text translation over the top of the photo you took.

Google Duplex on the Web

At Google I/O 2018 Google announced Duplex, the new assistant that could book appointments for you with striking life like vocal intonation and realistic voice synthesis. Now Google are extending this service. Duplex is now available in 44 US states and it is moving beyond voice to carrying out tasks on the web. For example when you're making rental car booking or buying movie tickets. It will automate all this by auto filling forms for you and asking your permission to proceed for the purchase or booking. It personalises things based on previous trip confirmation in Gmail.

Next generation Google Assistant

Next generation Google Assistant is now here and its AI capabilities are ten times faster. Normally the AI models that Google run in their cloud range up to around 100Gb of data. Now Google have improved their AI algorithms so that they only need half a gig of data that sits locally on your phone running the AI models. This means Assistant can process things in real time and deliver things ten times faster. You can make several requests in a row without saying hey Google each time and open apps super fast with voice commands. Assistant can now also orchestrate across apps fast. Email dictation has improved hugely. and Assistant can recognise when you're dictating the email vs dictating an action such as setting the subject line of the message or sending the email. Pretty advanced stuff!

Reference Resolution

Reference resolution is a thing. What? So, as well all know, things in the world can have many different meaning and us human's have pretty amazing abilities to relate things in our world to context or situation they relate to. What's more we know the relationship between things. Now, so does Google Assistant. For example, you can say "How long will it take to get to mom's House" and Assistant knows you're talking about your own mom's house, not the restaurant called Mom's House ten miles down the road. It'll recognise family members by relationship so you can say things like "show me pictures of my son". Assistant will recognise that "my son" is referring to your own son, not some thing called "my son".

Waze

Google Assistant is coming to Waze, soon!

Gestures in the new Google Home Hub

There is a new Home Hub! It has a built in camera. It can play music, movies and display apps and web pages. The camera will allow you to have video conference using Google Duo and best of all, when you have loud music playing you no longer need to shout loudly to tell it to stop. All you do is hold you hand up in front of the camera, as if you're intimating "stop" and it'll stop.

Privacy improvements

Ironically, there was a plane circling around the Shoreline Amphitheatre all throughout the opening keynote with a banner flying behind it dissing Google's stance on privacy. Yeah. So while this stunt was happening in the sky, Google announced a bunch of privacy improves. Privacy settings is now right at the of the Settings menu making it super easy to find. There's now an auto delete option so you can set who long Google retains data about you. This will slowly start to roll out across all of the data Google collects about you. There will be an incognito mode for search and that'll also apply to Maps later in the year. That means Google does not retain what you search for on the web or on Maps. There's also a new thing called Federated Learning. Imagine for a moment that the AI learning system for Google Keyboard (GBoard) is brought from the cloud down to your local phone. It'll run totally on your phone. As millions of people type words that Google doesn't recognise, those local, new words, as uploaded to Google's cloud, which means that not only does your own phone learn the words over time but EVERYONE's GBoard learns those new words and can suggest them as people type.

Accessibility for everyone

We now have live captioning for videos. Record a video live and watch the spoken content being transcribed to text in real time. Same applies for podcasts. There's also a new project called Euphonia which is pretty amazing. Lots of people have slurred speech and this make it very hard for voice to text systems to work properly. Euphonia is a new project that is training a set of new neural network models to accurately recognise slurred speech and transcribe it to text. It's early days and Google are opening up Euphonia to the crowd so that others can contribute their own voice samples to help improve the system.

Android Q

Dark mode! Need I say more? Save battery by not lighting up all those pixels on your power hungry OLED screens. Thanks Google.

You'll now be reminded when apps are sharing your location.

Family Link will be built right onto Settings. This means you can control down time, bedtime app usage limits and more.

Pixel Phone

The new Pixel 3a and 3a XL were announced, but everyone knew about it due to all the leaks. And yes, it's a nice $399 US, with not much in the way of compromise. Watch out OnePlus!

HowTo Markup

You can now markup your web content with HowTo Markup so that when you're searching using Google Home or Assistant, it now properly shows up.

App Actions

Oh yes, there are more App Actions for Finance, Health and Fitness, Food Ordering, Ride Sharing and more. This makes is faster and easier to launch these experiences by voice.

So there you have it, some of the main highlights from day one of Google I/O 2019.