This week the 2019 edition of Google’s I / O was held at the Shoreline amphitheater in Montain View, California, or what is the same, the event that the American firm holds with its developers to put the candy in the mouth of its latest innovations, and those to come. And if already last year one of its advances, not yet commercial, like Duplex – an intelligent voice that imitates that of its owner to be able to make calls on his behalf and to be able to book from a restaurant to a hairdressing appointment- was scary- This year there is no turning back: Google is no longer a search engine, nor an advertising company, as everyone says, it is an artificial intelligence (AI) company, from head to toe.
As she says, “our vision is to be more useful to everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live or what you are wanting to do. And when we say useful, we mean offering the tools that allow people to expand their knowledge, health and success ”. And for this, as every year in I / O, new products come to the fore, all of them with an unmistakable taste or smell of artificial intelligence.
For example, the integration of the Full Coverage feature of Google News in the traditional search engine. Through machine learning , different parts of the news can be identified, from the sequence of events to the people involved. Or, another example, augmented reality (AR) applied to searches. If the user is looking for new shoes online, with the Google Lens app, they will be able to take a closer look at them at different angles and even see how they match their clothes. You can also use Google Lens to get more information about what you are seeing in the real world. Thus, if you are in a restaurant, you can focus on the menu with your mobile camera and Google Lens will highlight the dishes that are most popular, show images and reviews of other people who have been there before. With GoogleGo, a new application for users with low vision using a smartphone for the first time , Google Lens will read words aloud, helping millions of adults around the world who have difficulties reading street signs or instructions at an ATM. .
And if last year Google presented Duplex technology in its I / O, now the multinational wants to take its intelligent assistant with Duplex beyond voice, to help do anything on the web. “To begin with,” they say at Google, “we are focusing on two specific tasks: booking rental cars and movie tickets. Using “Duplex on the Web”, the wizard automatically enters the information, navigates through the different steps of the reservation, and completes the operation instead of doing the user. And thanks to advances in deep learning, it is now possible to offer speech and natural language understanding on mobile phones, making Google’s smart assistant work faster ”.
But as not only software, they say, Google lives, integration with hardware is also essential in its strategy around AI. And that is why at the I / O 2019 they have also presented their new smartphone Pixel 3a and 3a XL, in addition to Google Nest Hub Max, a new intelligent assistant with a 10-inch screen that will compete with Amazon Echo Show . I am not going to recount the characteristics of each of these new devices until we can see and test them live, but Google’s philosophy seems to be to make these devices more accessible, in price, to all types of customers.
On the other hand, Google has said at its developer convention, that it is carrying out a series of improvements in privacy so that people know how to choose clearly about their data. And also, he says, he is making great strides in security with Android Q, the new operating system for smartphones.
And not happy with all these developments, Google pulled out of the hat in the course of I / O a new artificial intelligence technique that it calls ‘federated learning’, which allows training AI models with less data and making products more smart devices without data leaving the device. For example, with ‘federated learning’, Gboard can learn new words like “zoodles” or “Targaryen” after thousands of people have started using it, without us really knowing what it means. “Moving forward, advancements in AI will provide new ways to make our products require less data to help.”
