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NOTE: This post will be continually updated to rank the biggest announcements from Google IO 2018 as they occur!…refresh often!
We made our Google IO 2018 predictions but the time has come for Google to make things officially official. Here are the biggest announcements from the event, updated by the minute, as they happen.
Google Murders Siri
Google just murdered Apple’s Siri in their latest Google Assistant demonstration. Google Duplex’s ability to use and recognize natural language may just be the most impressive demonstration out of Google IO 2018. The example Google showed off live had Google Assistant book a hair salon appointment all by itself… and it was flawless.
Siri is dead. There’s no catching up.
Google Lens integrated directly in Camera App
Your camera app will soon do a lot more than just take photos and videos. Google is integrating “Google Lens” directly into the camera app, showing little contextual dots on items, places, and things that it recognizes. Tap on the colored dot for more info.
Google Lens can read text, identify products, give historical information about landmarks, tell you about nearby stores and restaurants, and a whole lot more. Rather than Googling something, pretty soon we’ll be popping open our camera app for more information..
Walking Navigation becomes epic
Google Maps has a brand new look for “Walking Directions” and it. is. amazing. It offers an augmented-reality first person view that is much more intuitive than what we’ve got today. It uses VPS (Visual Positioning System) to show you exactly where you are and exactly where you need to go.
As someone who uses walking directions frequently, I absolutely love this update.
Android P Beta available to download
Surprisingly, Google did NOT unveil the dessert name for Android P, but let users know that the Android P Beta is available for download from a number of partners starting today.
The mystery of Android P continues… Popsicle? Praline Pecan Pie? Hmmm.
6 New Google Assistant Voices
Google is adding 6 new voices to Google Assistant- have a listen:
They’re also adding celebrity voices, such as John Legend, later this year.
3 “Okay Google” Updates
A few big updates to Google Assistant will improve your “Okay Google ” experience:
- Continued Conversation – Google Assistant is making conversations more natural by removing the need to say “ok google” or “hey google” every time for every follow up query. This new feature is called Continued Conversation and it’s coming later this year.
- Multiple Actions – let’s you string together multiple commands in one sentence. The example provided was “Turn on the Warriors game and start the popcorn maker”
- Pretty Please – Google is improving Assistant family experiences by adding a new ‘pretty please’ option allowing positive experiences for children or anyone that needs a little ray of sunshine in their daily routine.
Smart Displays with YouTube TV
Coming in July are a bunch of Smart Displays – similar to the Amazon Echo Show – which will include both YouTube and YouTube TV support. We’re guessing Amazon’s products won’t get the same treatment. Wink wink. Nudge. Nudge.
Shown on screen were smart displays from JBL, Lenovo, and LG.
“Shush” for Android
New in Android P is a featured called “Shush”. Place your phone face-down on the table and it will automatically enter Do Not Disturb mode.
Google introduced several other features to improve what they call “Digital Wellbeing” including the Android Dashboard, an app timer to limit uses of specific apps, and a “wind down” option that turns your phone grayscale so you can rest your wary eyes before bed. You can schedule this daily with the Google Assistant command, “Hey Google, set wind down for 10PM”
Gmail Smart Compose
There’s a new feature for GMail that will auto-complete your sentences using machine learning. All you need to do is hit tab and Google’s AI will autocomplete your sentence for you, adding things like names, phone numbers, and addresses with ease. Google’s new Smart Compose will roll out to all users later this month.
Google Photos: Smart Solutions
A new feature in Google Photos will suggest solutions inline while viewing photos, allowing users to easily complete small tasks that will greatly improve their experience. Sharing photos, fixing exposure, converting photos to PDFs, popping color, and colorizing photos are some of the examples shown off.
Google News gets personal
Google has a new experience for Google News, personalizing news just for you, assembling the things you need to know about. The more you use Google News, the better it gets. The new Google News also includes something called Newscasts. These provide short previews of content, giving you an easy way to get started with your news.
Another new feature, dubbed “Subscribe with Google”, allows you to use your Google account to access your paid content everywhere from Google’s own products to publisher’s sites too. Shown off in the demo: The Washington Post. This allows you easily access high quality information that you care about with no hassle. This is rolling out in 127 countries today on Android, iOS, and web.
Android P Gestures
Android P has a drastically new gesture based UI. For those of you that have seen the gesture based UI on Apple’s iPhone X, you’ll notice many similarities. This new navigation system is much simpler and faster, allowing you to more easily accomplish normal navigation tasks.
App Actions and Slices
App Actions occur directly in your device’s search bar and gives a 60% predictive rate, adapting to the user, helping the user get to their next task as quick as possible. Slices are a new API allowing developers to surface snippets of apps in various places throughout the entire OS.
Cheeseburger and Beer Emojis: Fixed!
Sundar opened the Google IO 2018 Keynote on a light note, saying he was happy to announce that the cheeseburger and beer emojis have been fixed. What were the designers of the beer emoji thinking? No clue.
Other notes and announcements
- Over 7,000 people at Google IO 2018
- Google AI: opening AI centers around the world. AI will transform healthcare, such as diabetic retinopathy. AI systems offer more insight to look for things humans generally might miss or don’t look for.
- Google AI: AI can make accessibility better such as improving experiences for those that are hearing impaired by using audio and visual queues to clean up closed captioning.
- Gboard now supports Morse Code, available in beta later today.
- Improved Google Assistant News Feed – Google Assistant is getting more visually assistive, move interactive, immersive, and proactive on your phone. Adding food pickup and delivery, visually appealing responses, and what can be best described as an improved Google Feed on Google Assistant.
- Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps and Navigation this summer.
- Android Dashboard will get better at showing you how you spend your time
- Android Dashboard: shows you how you spent your time
- JOMO – Google is focusing more on the “Joy Of Missing Out” which focuses on 4 key areas:
- Understand your habits
- Focus on what matters
- Switch off and wind down
- Find balance for your family
- YouTube “Take A Break” Reminders will help you avoid too much binge-watching
- YouTube Notifications digest will give you one notification that groups all your updates together, so you don’t get overwhelmed by constant subscription updates (rolling out this week)
- Android Adaptive battery: Google partnered with DeepMind to use AI to adapt to users’ usage patterns. Your Android smartphone will learn how you like to set your brightness and adapt to your usage. This allows for a 30% reduction in CPU app wakeups, drastically increasing battery life for users.
- ML Kit – for developers on both Android and iOS to access image labeling, text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning, landmark detection, smart reply
- Google Maps to get “Trending” locations on the “For you” section of Maps. There is a featured called “Your match” that tries to find places that are perfect specifically for you, giving you the reasons that it selects those places. Called the “For you tab” and “Your match”.
- Group Planning: Long press on any place to add it to a short list and then share it with your friends. They can add more places and/or vote for their favorites, making decisions quick, easy, and final.
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