Google I/O

As Google described during the I/O session, the new on-device surface would organize what’s most relevant to users, inviting them to jump back into their apps.

Google says the new SDK would help Google expand on its core mission of connecting the right audience to the right content at the right time.

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

When triggered, the AI-powered feature will automatically lock the device down.

This latest release, one of many announcements from the Google I/O 2024 developer conference, focuses on improved battery life and other performance improvements, like more efficient workout tracking.

The company said it is increasing the on-device capability of its Google Play Protect system to detect fraudulent apps trying to breach sensitive permissions.

Gemini, the company’s family of generative AI models, will enhance the smart TV operating system so it can generate descriptions for movies and TV shows.

The space is available from the launcher and can be locked as a second layer of authentication.

Users will be able to access the AR content by first searching for a location in Google Maps.

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.