Google I/O 2017: highlights from the developer conference – The Verge

How about an Android Pro?

2017-05-22T09:37:48-04:00

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 caut …

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Should Samsung Galaxy S8 owners buy a Gear VR or Google Daydream?

2017-05-19T14:56:39-04:00

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 …

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How does Google Assistant stack up against Siri on an iPhone?

2017-05-19T13:12:37-04:00

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.

Access

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 A …

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Google wants AI to manage my relationships, and that might be a good thing

2017-05-19T07:30:02-04:00

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 …

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You’ll soon be able to send money with Google Assistant

2017-05-18T17:36:19-04:00

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.

If this all sounds familiar, it's becau …

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Google’s Seurat technology turned a film-quality Rogue One scene into mobile VR

2017-05-18T16:03:47-04:00

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 n …

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The Android app beta on Chrome OS will last at least through the summer

2017-05-18T15:01:07-04:00

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 …

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Google’s latest platform play is artificial intelligence, and it’s already winning

2017-05-18T13:25:46-04:00

Google CEO Sundar Pichai shows off the company’s new AI computer chip at I/O this year. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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.

Google's free software gives it influence in the global AI ecosystem

For Google, this doesn't just mean us …

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Google isn’t building the ultimate VR headset. It’s setting the foundation for one

2017-05-18T13:21:42-04:00

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 C …

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YouTube VR will have shared rooms and voice chat instead of comment sections

2017-05-18T12:30:02-04:00

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 a …

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