Need to know about Google I/O Keynote

Google kicks off its developer conference each year with a rapid-fire stream of announcements, including many unveilings of recent things it's been working on. Have a look at these new announcements, which were promised at this year Google I/O keynote. TechCrunch website has detailed the announcements with precision.

Google Maps

Google Maps unveiled a new "Immersive View for Routes" feature in select cities. The new feature brings all of the information that a user may need into one place, including details about traffic simulations, bike lanes, complex intersections, parking and more.

Magic Editor and Magic Compose

Google's Magic Editor feature is AI-powered for more complex edits in specific parts of the photos, for example the foreground or background and can also fill in gaps in the photo or even reposition the subject for a better-framed shot.

There is also a new feature called Magic Compose, demoed today, that shows it being used with messages and conversations to rewrite texts in different styles.

Palm 2

Google's newest large language model (LLM) is Palm 2. According to Tech Crunch website, "PaLM 2 will power Google's updated Bard chat tool, the company's competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features the company is announcing today."

PaLM 2 also now features improved support for writing and debugging code.

Bard gets smarter

Google is not only removing its waitlist for Bard and making its available, in English, in over 180 countries and territories, but it's also launching support for Japanese and Korean with a goal of supporting 40 languages in the near future. It's also working for Bard's ability to surface images in its responses. In addition, Google is partnering with Adobe for some art generation capabilities via Bard.

Workspace

According to Tech Crunch website, Google's Workspace suite is also getting the AI touch to make it smarter, with the addition of an automatic table (but not formula) generation in Sheets and image creation in Slides and Meet. The new features for Slides and Meet include the ability to type in what kind of visualization you are looking for, and the AI will create that image. Specifically for Google Meet, that means custom backgrounds.

MusicLM

MusicLM is Google's new experimental AI tool that turns text into music. For example, if you are hosting a dinner party, you can simply type, "soulful jazz for a dinner party" and have the tool create several versions of the song.

Search

Google Search has two new features surrounding better understanding of content and the context of an image the user is viewing in the search results. The new feature includes more information with an "About this Image" feature and new markup in the file itself that will allow images to be labelled as "AI-generated." Both of these are extensions of work already going on, but is meant to provide more transparency on if the "image is credible or AI-generated," albeit not an end-all-be-all of addressing the larger problem of AI image misinformation.

Google Cloud

There's a new A3 supercomputer virtual machine in town. According to TechCrunch, "this A3 has been purpose-built to handle the considerable demands of these resource-hungry use cases," noting that A3 is "armed with NVIDIA's H100 GPUs and combining that with a specialized data center to derive immense computational power with high throughput and low latency, all at what they suggest is a more reasonable price point than you would typically pay for such a package."

Pixel 7A

Google's Pixel 7a goes on sale May 11 at USD100 less than the Pixel 7 (USD 499). Like the Pixel 6a, it has the 6.1-inch screen versus the 6.4-inch Pixel 7. It also launched in India.

Pixel Fold

One of the big announcements that already dropped is that Google used May 4 (aka "May the Fourth Be With You" Day) to unveil it will have a foldable Pixel phone.

This phone is said to have "the real secret sauce in the Pixel Fold experience is, unsurprisingly, the software...The app continuity when switching between the external and internal screens is quite seamless, allowing you to pick up where you left off as you change screen sizes. Naturally, Google has optimized its most popular third-party apps for the big screen experience, including Gmail and YouTube."

Universal Translator

Google is testing a powerful new translation service that puts video into a new language while also synchronizing the speaker's lips with words they never spoke. Called "Universal Translator," it was shown as "an example of something only recently made possible by advances in AI, but simultaneously presenting serious risks that have to be reckoned with from the start," reported Tech Crunch.