Google I/O 2017: highlights from the developer conference

At Google I/O this past week, I got my first taste of the next version of Android and I enjoyed almost everything about it. Android has gotten to the stage where improvements come in only incremental steps, and Google is mostly making the right ones with its annual updates. But I have an underlying worry about where this is all going: as Android grows more proactive and assistive, I fear it might end up alienating its more technically inclined users.

So here’s a radical thought: maybe there’s now room for more than one canonical variant of Android. I can instantly hear the chorus of disagreement, bellowing the word “fragmentation” with cautionary zeal, but Google is already working on a modified version with Android Go, its extra lean serving for lower-spec devices. What I have in mind is a similarly stripped-down option intended for pro users: an Android Pro.

This week, Google announced a major expansion of its Daydream virtual reality platform. Daydream, currently only available on niche Android phones, is rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus this summer. That means that millions of smartphone owners will soon have two huge tech companies trying to sell them VR headsets.

Google is offering the $79 Daydream View, which you’ll need to launch Daydream apps on your phone. Samsung sells the $129 Gear VR, which lets you access Oculus Home, a platform created by Facebook-owned VR company Oculus. Both headsets work the same way: after you clip a phone into the headset, you can interact with VR experiences using a small handheld remote. But they look and feel very different, and each has a completely separate app ecosystem.

Some of the biggest news to come out of Google I/O this week was that Google Assistant is coming to iOS, looking to take a shot at Siri, Apple’s own entrenched AI assistant. While Assistant has been available on Android for a while now, how does the AI assistant stack up against Siri when its forced to go head-to-head on Apple’s far more limited playing field? We put the two head-to-head.

One of the most important parts of any AI assistant is how easy it is to access. One of the biggest selling points of Amazon’s Echo hardware is the always-listening feature that lets Alexa always be on hand to respond to any queries or commands. On Android, Assistant has deep, OS-level hooks that make it more more accessible and functional. But on iOS, things are a little tougher.

When Google said that not sharing photographs of your friends made you “kind of a terrible person” at this year’s I/O keynote, I bristled. The idea that its new Google Photos app would automatically suggest I share pictures with specific people sounded dystopian, especially because so much of the keynote seemed geared toward getting Google’s AI systems to help maintain relationships. Want to answer an email without even thinking about it? Inbox’s suggested responses are rolling out all over Gmail. Has a special moment with somebody slipped your mind? Google might organize photos from it into a book and suggest you have it printed.

Google is far from the first company to do this; Facebook suggests pictures to share and reminds you of friends’ birthdays all the time, for example. It’s easy to describe these features as creepy false intimacy, or say that they’re making us socially lazy, relieving us of the burden of paying attention to people. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve decided that I’m all right with an AI helping manage my connections with other people — because otherwise, a lot of those connections wouldn’t exist at all.

Google’s approach to money is many-pronged. There’s Google Wallet, Android Pay, the open Payment Request API it’s spearheading, and now the brand new “Google Payment API,” to name just a few of its approaches.

This latest system will allow you to buy things — both inside apps and on websites — using your Google account. Most people have a credit card stored with Google for some reason or another, like for Google Play Store purchases, or a YouTube Red subscription. The new API will allow third party developers to charge you through your Google account, with Google handling the security and processing.

Google has a new tool called Seurat that’s designed to take high-end, film-quality 3D scenes and turn them into something that can run on mobile hardware. To demonstrate the technology, Google partnered with IMXLAB at Lucasfilm to take a high-fidelity digital set from Rogue One, which originally took hours per frame to render, and compressed the polygons and textures into something that could run in realtime on its prototype WorldSense headset.

We got to check out a demo, and it did indeed look great. The scene — a dark and foreboding Imperial Hangar — has realtime reflections and lighting effects, along with a looming, animated K-2. It’s not exactly cinema quality, but it’s better than what you’d normally see running on mobile hardware — although we aren’t actually certain how much power is inside the prototype WorldSense headset to begin with.

The Chromebook Pro was meant to be a grand coming-out party for Android apps running on Chrome OS. The Samsung device would show Google’s ability to not just dominate the education space with web apps, but remove the “native app” issue for anybody that was holding out. But the feature has been stuck in a buggy beta for months and the device itself was delayed. Not great.

We fully expected an update this year at Google I/O, and now we have one. Although Google chose not to say anything up on a big stage, there is good news, bad news, and potentially very exciting news to share. “I don’t want to overpromise,” says Kan Liu, senior director of product management for Chrome OS. But he says soon Google will be ready to kick off the splashy product launch we were supposed to have earlier this year.

Google has always used its annual I/O conference to connect to developers in its sprawling empire. It announces new tools and initiatives, sprinkles in a little hype, and then tells those watching: choose us, and together we’ll go far. But while in previous years this message has been directed at coders working with Android and Chrome — the world’s biggest mobile OS and web browser respectively — yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai made it clear that the next platform the company wants to dominate could be even bigger: artificial intelligence.

For Google, this doesn’t just mean using AI to improve its own products. (Although it’s certainly doing that). The company wants individuals and small companies around the world to also get on board. It wants to wield influence in the wider AI ecosystem, and to do so has put together an impressive stack of machine learning tools — from software to servers — that mean you can build an AI product from the ground up without ever leaving the Google playpen.

When word spread in 2016 that Google would move into serious virtual reality, not just disposable cardboard viewers, my colleague Dieter Bohn immediately put a couple of pieces together. One was the need for headsets that could track motion without dedicated “VR rooms” full of cameras or markers. The other was Project Tango, a Google experiment that used an array of cameras to map physical space. Google only announced the more modest Daydream mobile headset that year, but a Tango-powered device seemed inevitable. At I/O 2017, it finally arrived, in the form of a standalone headset that’s supposed to ship later this year.

Google head of VR Clay Bavor describes the new headset as one point on a spectrum called “immersive computing,” an emerging technological paradigm that “enables our computers to work more like we do.” His team’s been working on this project for two and a half years, and Google is partnering with Qualcomm, HTC, and Lenovo to release a reference design and two commercial products based on it. If this works, Google’s years-long experiments with augmented and virtual reality will have converged into the ideal self-contained VR headset. But the standalone device feels more like a new beginning than a culmination — and it may be healthier for VR if we treat it that way.

Google’s Daydream VR platform is getting its first major software revamp later this year, nudging the interface toward being a more full-featured operating system. The update, codenamed Daydream Euphrates, will roll out to all phones with Daydream support. As part of a larger move to support self-contained headsets that aren’t powered by phones, it will add a 2D panel that pops up on top of virtual environments, giving all users better access to normal Android functions in VR.

“The whole idea behind this is, we don’t want to take you out of the VR experience if you need to check notifications or change a setting or pause or do whatever,” says Mike Jazayeri, the Daydream director of product management.

The virtual reality version of YouTube is adding shared rooms that will let people view 360-degree videos together, part of a larger update to Google’s Daydream VR platform. The new feature, coming later this year, offers what YouTube VR product lead Erin Teague calls a “co-watching experience.” That means that small groups of people can enter a viewing session, talking to each other via voice chat.

Teague describes community as “one of the core pillars that makes YouTube YouTube.” People will have control over what they’re viewing, but they’ll be able to see what other people are watching and choose to sync up the same video. People will appear as customizable (but generally human-looking) avatars, and they’ll speak out loud in real time instead of leaving comments or chat messages. “How do you take comments and apply them to VR?” Teague asks. The answer? “Voice will be the way that people express themselves in VR.”

Google’s standalone VR headset, announced yesterday at I/O, was both obvious and unexpected. People have been talking about a self-contained Google headset for over a year, and speculating (quite confidently) that the company would eventually use Tango augmented reality tracking in lieu of outside cameras. But Google head of VR Clay Bavor didn’t just announce the existence of new hardware — he promised a reference design and two commercial versions, made by HTC and Lenovo, by the end of the year.

That’s an aggressive timeline, suggesting that Google’s already got something in pretty good shape. Despite this, Bavor didn’t show much on stage besides a line drawing of the planned hardware. After the keynote, though, I was part of a small group that got to check out an early prototype — and while it’s too early to say whether Google can pull off a fully self-contained VR headset, the core technology really does work.

Now that Google Assistant has officially arrived to the iPhone (at least, for US-based users) a lot of people may be wondering why Google pushed the AI as a separate app from the main one. Here’s an overview of the differences between the two.

While it’s not officially called “Google Search” (and rather, just its plain ol’ namesake), many people refer to it as such because that’s essentially what the app is designed for. iOS users can download the app to add a nice little search widget on their home screen, using it to quickly look up things as you would on the website.

Google hosted its I/O developer’s conference today during which it announced additional features for its Photos app, virtual assistant, and Android O. A lot of these things were cool, but what was most befuddling throughout the event was the company’s continued focus on Mother’s Day. Does Google know when Mother’s Day is? Today, the company rolled out an update to its iOS Photos app that specifically highlights a Mother’s Day movie-making feature. See here:

As a reminder, Mother’s Day was this past Sunday, May 14th. To be fair to Google, this movie-making feature debuted before the holiday, but at the time, videos could only be compiled from the desktop app and then subsequently edited through the app. Now they can be made on the app. Still, this is hyper-specific UI for a holiday that comes around once a year.

Here’s a 1 percenter problem: I have both an Amazon Echo and a Google Home in our apartment, and so I could theoretically use whichever one is better. In a lot of ways, I think the Google Home is better: it sounds nicer, it works with my television, and it knows a lot of personal information that I haven’t bothered to try to make available on Amazon’s Alexa.

But I usually just go with Alexa, because “Alexa” is way easier to say than “OK Google.”

Personally, I’ve always found one of the worst aspects of using a Nexus or Pixel smartphone to be getting stuck with Google’s bad, default emoji. Emoji intended to represent people look more like thumbs. Or, in the words of The Verge’s Megan Farokhmanesh, they resemble “normal emoji that melted.” Or Dots candy or something. I feel a slight anxiety when l include what should be a fun, cheerful emoji in my texts to friends who have iPhones or Samsung phones. which display more regular emoji. What will it look like to them? Must I pull up some chart to see?

Google finally got the message that these emoji suck. Okay, “suck” is a little harsh. I’m sure some of you like them. But they’ve always been a little too offbeat when other phone makers offer emoji that mostly look similar. Google tried to tone things down a little and restore normalcy with Android N, but it wasn’t enough. So this time the company decided to start over and make things right for Android O.

A lot of people turn to search engines when they’re looking for work, so today the world’s biggest search engine announced Google for Jobs. The project aims to leverage Google’s advanced machine learning capabilities, sorting through millions of job listings to better match opportunities with candidates.

Right now Google isn’t planning to start hosting its own job listings. It is collecting them from third parties like Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Monster, and ZipRecruiter. It then filters jobs for criteria like the length of the commute, and tries to bundle together openings for similar jobs that might be listed under different names. A couple of big companies, including FedEx and Johnson & Johnson, have been piloting the program, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai says they saw an 18 percent increase in applications over their previous methods.

After a year of incubation, Android Instant Apps are finally ready for the world. Originally announced at last year’s Google I/O, Instant Apps are a way for developers to offer a lightweight version of their Android app without requiring a visit to the Play Store. You just click a link in your web browser and all of a sudden you’re using a real Android app, with all the power that implies — other than a few safety restrictions. A few Instant Apps were made available in January as a trial run, and a few other companies have partnered with Google to build instant apps since then, but now at this year’s Google I/O the necessary tools have been made available to all developers.

To make an app Instant, developers need to make it modular and compatible with deep links, so users can click on a URL and end up in exactly the part of the app they’re looking to use. The initial download also needs to be under a certain size, but users also have the option to download the whole app once they’ve gotten a taste.

Google said today that we’re going to start seeing appliances show up with support for the Google Assistant, and two companies are already launching integrations: LG and GE.

Both companies are updating their existing lines of connected appliances so that they can be controlled through the Google Home and Assistant. Supported appliances including fridges, ovens, washers and dryers, an air purifier from LG, and an air conditioner and water heater from GE.

Google announced a few big updates for the Google Home today. None of them are game-changing on their own, but they all add up to a substantial update for the connected speaker. Details are pretty basic right now, and Google didn’t say when any of these features would arrive, but here’s the gist of what’s coming up for the Home.

Google calls this feature “proactive assistance.” Essentially, Google Home will do its best to alert owners to things they need to know, like reminders, traffic alerts, or flight delays.

At the moment, artificial intelligence lives in the cloud, but Google — and other big tech companies — want it work directly on your devices, too. At Google I/O today, the search giant announced a new initiative to help its AI make this leap down to earth: a mobile-optimized version of its machine learning framework named TensorFlowLite.

The original TensorFlow was released in November 2015, and quickly became popular with both researchers and developers as a way to build AI tools. TensorFlow is flexible, reliable, and comes with a big stack of documentation that makes it easy for beginners to get started. The newly announced version, TensorFlowLite, will build on this, helping users slim down their machine learning algorithms to work on-device.

Google is working with partners on a standalone VR headset that will support inside-out tracking. The headsets track virtual space with something Google calls “WorldSense,” powered by technology from its Tango augmented reality system. Google is creating a reference design with help from Qualcomm, and it’s also working with HTC and Lenovo for standalone headsets.

There’s no release date or price announced on stage, and as with Daydream last year, we’re only seeing an outline of the headset — which appears alongside a Daydream-like controller. A closer look at the project, published at Backchannel, says that Google has developed a prototype and that Lenovo and HTC will release commercial versions “in the coming months.” It should fall in “the mid-hundreds range,” apparently comparable to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive’s $600 to $700 range. Bavor has also published an essay with details on Medium.

It’s been a year since Google announced its Daydream VR program, and we’ve been wondering whether other companies’ flagship devices would support Google’s platform. Today at Google I/O, the company confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, and LG’s next flagship device will support Daydream.

Google says support for the S8 will roll out as a software update over the air, slated for this summer. Google’s Vice President of Virtual Reality says this is great momentum for Daydream on its first six months and he is delighted to have Samsung’s support despite the company running its own Gear VR platform.

Google just announced that it will officially support Kotlin on Android as a “first-class” language. Kotlin is a super new programming language built by JetBrains, which also coincidentally develops the JetBrains IDE that Android Studio — Google’s official developer tool — is based on. Like Java, which is the default language for Android development, Kotlin is a language that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and it’s already possible to use Kotlin and many other JVM languages for Android development. Android doesn’t use the JVM exactly, but the Java roots are strong, and Kotlin’s interoperability with Java have made it a popular choice for developers. Official Google support will be a huge boost for the nascent language, however, and will presumably make working with Kotlin on Android a lot more natural.

Kotlin tools will be included with Android Studio 3.0 by default, and JetBrains and Google are pledging to support the language going forward.

Google is attempting again to make a budget Android platform for developing markets with Android Go, a program that seems similar to Google’s Android One strategy, to create a version of Android for lower-powered devices.

Android Go will be focused around building a version of Android for phones with less memory, with the System UI and kernel able to run with as little as 512MB of memory. Apps will be optimized for low bandwidth and memory, with a version of Play Store designed for those markets that will highlight these apps. Google is also launching a new program called “Building for Billions” to help developers create these new optimized apps. We’ve already seen some of these efforts with Google’s YouTube Go beta, which launched earlier this year in India.