Google I/O 2023: They mentioned AI 142 times! (Part 1)
In Part 1, we are going to be talking about all things AI announced during the recent Google I/O keynote.
Google wrapped their annual developer conference called ‘Google I/O’, just a few hours ago, giving all of us lots to talk about and try out in the coming months. This year’s focus was extensively on AI and Google made sure to highlight all its use cases across their products and services. And this was much anticipated. After the rise of ChatGPT by OpenAI in the last few years and Microsoft doing its best to adapt all its power in all its glory into their Bing Search and the Copilot feature in the MS Office suite, everyone had their eyes on Google. What would Google — the search king, do this year? And this Google I/O was a clear answer to that question.
So, let’s have a look at how Google is improving on their Worksuit services using AI as mentioned in their new I/O conference:
1. G-Suit powered by Duet AI
And by that I mean, Google Sheets, Google Slides and Google Docs, etc. Yes, all of them are getting supercharged with some new AI focus features with something Google is calling Duet AI.
a. Google Docs: It can now generate an entire resume with the qualifications you mention for a job description. At least, that’s what the demo shows but there’s a lot more to it. Summarising your doc content, continuing it with AI, and even finding images for the stories you write in Docs. I feel you will be saving a lot of time switching tabs from ChatGPT to Google Docs with this single feature.
b. Google Slides: Google mentioned their new Imagen model which will be able to generate images based on textual descriptions mentioned by users. You can also select from a wide range of styles for the images generated by the AI — from photography, illustration to background and clipart.
Also, the AI also generates speaker notes for every slide of your presentation.
c. Google Sheets: Creating custom plans on Sheets will be more wholesome with the new Duet AI feature wherein a user’s prompt will generate templates on the Sheet and even automate some data classification
d. GMail: After the huge success of Smart Reply and Smart Compose features in Gmail, which allowed users to give suggested replies and auto-complete the next few phrases in their email, Google is now bringing a way to compose an entire message for your email using the ‘Help Me Write’ feature.
2. Google Maps
I was wondering when they mentioned Maps, what Google could do to Maps with AI? And sure enough, Google surprised us again — with Immersive View! Google Maps will soon allow you to view your entire route in a much more immersive way, with Google Earth-like visualization of the route. Better shown than said, so this is what they presented during the keynote:
This be available in selected countries and states initially by the end of this year and expand to more countries in the next few years. Mapping is not that easy and any effort in this direction is cardinal (pun intended).
3. Google Photos
Oh yes, I was excited about this a ton! I am jealous of all Pixel users who get to use features like the Magic Eraser, allowing them to remove objects/people from the background whenever and however required. So what’s next? According to Google, Magic Editor is next! Consider this to be a sibling of the Magic Eraser, allowing you to edit your photos by repositioning objects in them, changing sky colors, making certain small overlapping objects — puff — disappear…
If Apple does not bring these cool features to their native photos app in th next two years, I will gladly switch to Pixel!
4. Google Bard
What’s Google Bard, you might ask? In simple terms, it is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. A conversational AI allows users to get answers to their questions in the traditional chat-type way. It is built on top of PaLM 2, its next-generation language model (which is also the base for its third-part integrations with Google Cloud).
For a long time, Bard was closed and only limited to few developers but now they are opening themselves and unleasing its power in 180+ countries and supports not just English but also Japanese and Korean, all the while, working on 40 more languages as you read this post. Can’t wait to try this in my own native language and see how this helps Google’s voice assistant.
5. Google Search (under Google Labs)
The question of the year — how will AI benefit Google Search? Being the search king and a default search engine for billions of people across the planet, Google cannot just slip away without showing us how their very own search is going to shine with the power of AI. Sure enough, they demonstrated using Google Labs, how Generative AI will work on Google Search to find better answers to user’s queries.
This reminds me a bit of Bing Search but Google clearly has an unfair advantage — their shopping tab, which already is home to millions of products available across online stores along with customer reviews, ratings other metadata. So fair enough, Google did not shy away from showing off how shopping-related queries will be met with perfectly curated shopping suggestions in their new Generative AI Search
Can’t wait to use this new search. Right now this is only an experimental feature being tested for feedback using Google Labs (starting with the US only).
So those were all the important AI and AI-related features Google is bringing to your G-Suite and other services in the next few months. It’s amazing how fast we are seeing companies catch up to the rise and glory of ChatGPT and make it work in their own way for their own products and services.
I still have some questions about how and when they will bring all the power of Bard to their voice assistant because, for all I know, Google might end up making their Voice Assistant not just useful but super-powerful with all these AI features. Secondly, what’s happening to YouTube? Will it not get any AI features? As cool as YouTube’s algorithm already is, imagine having shopping suggestions for a new phone directly from the best Tech YouTubers!
That’s it for all AI-related announcements during the 2023 Google I/O. But it’s not the end. This is just Part 1. In Part 2, we will be talking about the extended Pixel family which you can read here.
-Aditya
