Everything announced at Google I/O 2024 including Gemini AI...
At the end of I/O, Google’s annual developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company had said “AI” 121 times. That, essentially, was the crux of Google’s two-hour keynote — stuffing AI into every Google app and service used by more than two billion people around the world. Here are all the major updates from Google's big event, along with some additional announcements that came after the keynote.
Google announced a brand new AI model called Gemini 1.5 Flash
Google announced a brand new AI model called Gemini 1.5 Flash, which it says is optimized for speed and efficiency. Flash sits between Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Nano, which is the company’s smallest model that runs locally on device. Google said that it created Flash because developers wanted a lighter and less expensive model than Gemini Pro to build AI-powered apps and services while keeping some of the things like a long context window of one million tokens that differentiates Gemini Pro from competing models.
Google showed off Project Astra
Project Astra is an early version of a universal assistant powered by AI that Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said was Google’s version of an AI agent “that can be helpful in everyday life.” In a video that Google says was shot in a single take, an Astra user moves around Google’s London office holding up their phone and pointing the camera at various things — a speaker, some code on a whiteboard, and out a window — and has a natural conversation with the app about what it sees.
Google Photos gets an AI boost
Google Photos was already intelligent when it came to searching for specific images or videos, but with AI, Google is taking things to the next level. If you’re a Google One subscriber in the US, you will be able to ask Google Photos complex questions like “show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited." Google Photos will use GPS information and its own judgment to present you with options. You can also ask Google Photos to generate captions to post the photos to social media.
Introducing Veo and Imagen 3
Google unveiled its new AI-powered media creation engines, Veo and Imagen 3. Veo can produce “high-quality” 1080p videos that can last “beyond a minute” and understand cinematic concepts like timelapse. Imagen 3 is a text-to-image generator that handles text better than its previous version, producing “photorealistic, lifelike images” and fewer artifacts.
Major changes to Google Search
Google is making big changes to how Search fundamentally works. Google will now present AI-generated answers on top of the results by default, a feature called AI Overviews. It aims to bring this feature to more than a billion users around the world by the end of the year.
Android and Wear OS updates
Google is integrating Gemini directly into Android, allowing users to pull up context-specific AI overlay. Additionally, Wear OS 5 promises a 20 percent reduction in power consumption compared to Wear OS 4, with a focus on better battery life.
Android 15's Theft Detection Lock
Android 15 introduces Theft Detection Lock, a feature using AI to predict phone thefts and lock the device accordingly, making it harder for thieves to access user data.
Other updates
Google is adding digital watermarks to AI-generated video and text, making Gemini accessible in Gmail and Docs, introducing a virtual AI teammate in Workspace, real-time scam detection during phone calls, and more innovations.
Catch up on all the news from Google I/O 2024 right here!
