Google I/O 2017: A Set of the Noteworthy Takeaways

Google is up and ready with its latest conference of Google I/O 2017 which was held at Mountain View, CA and ended yesterday on a high note. As predicted CEO Sundar Pichai started the keynote presenting the roadmap of the big technical innovations that would be coming in during the period of 3 days.

In the concluded event, the company discussed about the future of Android, Google Home, Virtual Reality, Google Assistant and much more. Some of the standout announcement was related to Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality during the course of the conference. With each passing year, the company is settled in giving the information of what it is doing and what it wants to do for the developers, instead of trying to woo and impress the consumers or the media.
Therefore, keeping the facts intact, let us see the important and noteworthy takeaways from Google I/O 2017;

Seeing through Google Lens

One of the biggest announcements of Keynote day one, CEO Sundar Pichai quoted that “We are clearly at an inflection point with visions and this inspires us to announce our new initiative as Google Lens”. Google lens is set of vision based computing cable that can understand itself what the user is looking at and lets them to take action based on that information. It is a blend of computer vision and AI technology that helps the search engine to sort images that is pointed by the camera. The Google lens can be integrated with Google Assistant so that you could mine the image for extracting meaningful data from it.

TPUs and Machine Learning

After finishing the Google lenses, Mr. Pichai introduced the cloud TPUs, which are tipped as the second generation of Google’s Tensor Processing units of Google Cloud. Explaining the relative stuff, the CEO quoted that “It will immensely increase and accelerate the machine learning workloads.”The reformed Tensor Processing units will deliver 180 teraflops of FPP (floating print performance) and will have the capability to combine into pods of 64 TPUs. The delivery performance is also impressive as 11.5 petaflops.

All about Google Assistant

After Mr. Pichai as the VP of engineering, Mr. Scott Huffman took centre stage; everybody was excited about the new announcements related to Google Assistant. Google Assistant has improved its conversational abilities and will also give proactive notifications to make the conversation more resilient. Users will now be enabled to manage their real world tasks more efficiently with Google Assistant such as scheduling appointments, shopping, booking services and many more. More importantly, it will be available on the iOS platform as well and would be more competent as compared to the other options available.

Google Photos gets an immense makeover

Google photos, since it was launched about two years ago got an immense makeover at I/O event of the year from Google. VP of photos Mr. Anil Sabharwal took a snap on the stage to show it to the audience of how far Google Photos have come. The unique features that he announced included ‘Suggested Sharing’ that means with the help of AI, this feature will send the photos on the basis of who are there in the photos. Also, when you share a specific thing related to a get-together or a family function, there will be suggestions of people to whom the photos are sent.

Another feature known as, ‘Shared Libraries’ will allow the users to automatically share the photos with their near and dear ones. Also, the sharing can be made very specific by selecting the date so that only the relative photos can be sent.

The most exciting feature is ‘Photo Books’, that will bring forward the option to bring back the magical tradition of keeping photo albums. It will allow the user to design and order high quality photo books through Google Photos. Google search technology will use this and will bring out the best and high definition photos sorting out the low quality ones.

Introducing the Big Fish “Android O”

Android O was the buzzword even before the start of I/O 2017 and no wonder that everyone was waiting for it with much anticipation. It includes a new fluid experience feature in picture-in-picture and will allow doing two tasks at the same time. It will have a smart text selection which will help the machine learning to recognize certain things or groups and set the deal without moving the annoying text icons.

Android O will also have Google Play Protect which is a comprehensive set service for Android and will be built into every device of Google Play. The play protect will automatically detect all the threats and viruses and will also use the machine language to look forward to new emerging problems. Mr. Pichai also announced that Android has reached a significant Milestone of 2 billion users monthly on their devices.

Kotlin as the key for Developers

Google has also included Kotlin as a programming language as it is concise, safe, inter-portable and tool friendly. The programming language can also work on multiplatform applications. It doesn’t end here; tools from Kotlin will be included as default with Android Studio 3.0. Official Google support will be a huge boost and will presumably make working with Kotlin on Android a lot more natural, especially when JetBrains and Google are pledging to support the language going forward.

Going ahead with AR and VR

The session concluded with focusing on the upcoming technologies such as AR and VR. Like last year, this year too Google came up with enhanced Daydream standalone headsets that would enable every benefits of VR and the standalone headset will not require any external phone or PC connection. Google has also worked on the QUALCOMM reference designs of these headsets that will be currently working on the high end smartphones.

Wrapping Up
Like every year, Google I/O 2017 was profound, prolific and esthetic. Every new announcement was core, firm and related to the well being of the app developers. Technologies like machine learning were introduced so as to make the life of the customer easier in the future. With I/O 2017, Google has poised itself as a well positioned and visionary leader that is appreciating and including new things.

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Ketan Chavda

With in-depth knowledge in International Business Management and Information Technology, he can effectively craft business enhancement strategies and can skillfully untangle technical complexities. This has laid the path for him as the Co-Founder and MD of Prismetric . Writing about the new age technology and sharing his thoughts on the continuously evolving business trends keep him content.