Google I/O 2021 Keynotes Highlights
Last year world was shook by a storm and cancellation of Google I/O 2020 was only a teeny tiny glimpse at the grave situation we were all in. World fought, and is still fighting, and I'm hopeful we're going to reach that bright sunny day real soon. HOPEFUL!
Google I/O is back! It's a celebration of technology.
Covid helped build tools that increase knowledge, success, health and happiness of everyone through Google's services.
To start with updates, Google Maps added 150K km of bike lanes and eco-friendly routes that will produce the lowest carbon footprint, fuel-efficient routes, safer routes to avoid accidents. Impact on education - Google helps 150 million student, teachers, educators all around the world through google classroom. Chrome book and google workspace together aim for providing seamless K12 education.
Work from Home with Google WorkSpace
WFH, is one of the reason the world still has some sanity right now and is obviously keeping the economic wheel in motion. To make working together better, google workspace is here for everyone, like really, for everyone.
This is nothing new, in fact, Google introduced docs and sheets back in 2006 followed by slides in 2007. After 15 years of being in the game of online collaboration, Google launches a new product experience called Smart Canvas which essentially enhances existing workspace products and acts as a brilliant brainstorming tool. What we're looking at is an immersive experience to stay connected in the moment. More updates:
- Gender neutral suggestions in docs, sheets and slides. Hurray humans!
- Meet calls integrated with docs, sheets or slides to stay connected in the collaboration process.
- Companion mode, noise cancellation, automatic adjustment of zoom and lighting during the video call. Customised participants view, live captions and translations.
Advancing AI
Personal favourite topic to look forward to every year and honestly I'm not disappointed! Some amazing announcements were made this year in the field of AI, particularly for folks interested in NLP research. Did you know AI is used in predicting links between web pages for better search results? It improves our beloved Google search everyday and is the backbone of translation. Google says it translated 20 Billion page in other language in last month alone and is aiming to build a universal translator. WOW!
Image Recognition
Image recognition is being used since 2014 at Google to automatically label images in Google Photos and remind us all of our memories. Last year alone 2B memories were viewed on Photos. Keep in mind it does so surfing through plenty of photos. Google lens is used 3 billion times per month and now it can also solve your kid's math problem. Sweet!
NLP
From processing around 250K hours of media to give live caption on android to developing Wavenet which is the backbone to 51 voices for google assistant, the NLP at Google has always been a topic of interest. Not long ago, BERT by Google took the research world by storm, so much that currently every state-of-the-art solution for many NLP applications is based on or inspired by BERT. They are running BERT model, out of the box, at their backend. It is even used in google search to improve search results.
BUT language is complex and its greatest challenge is ambiguity. It requires understanding context, identifying underlying concepts and recognising hidden meaning behind what's being said. The whole area of study dedicated to deep dive into language is called NLU (Natural language understanding). While we were just getting hang of BERT, arrives a new breakthrough: laMDA. A language model capable of doing open domain conversations. It's a huge deal specially for dialogue based applications, if it does, what it claims to. I would request you to have a look at this demo to really get a sense of what I'm talking about.
I'm amazed and let me know if you are too! Read more in detail at laMDA. Not only this, but they also introduced a 1000 times more powerful architecture than BERT called MUM. It understands language and also generates it. It is trained across 75 different languages and many different tasks at once, allowing it to develop a more comprehensive understanding of information and world knowledge than previous models. MUM is multimodal, so it understands information across text and images and, in the future, can expand to more modalities like video and audio. Read more in detail at MUM.
TPU
Algorithms can only do so much, what drives them is power of great hardware. Google hasn't left that box unchecked too. It released TPU V4, which is twice fast than V3, has 4096 chips in a single pod, can perform 10^18 floating point operations. A fastest AI computing system, also running on 90% carbon free energy. Amazing!
Quantum computing - The beginning
Well.. I'm a total NOOB here and this whole quantum computing setup demo was simply astonishing to me. It felt like those early days of computer era, where first computer was as big of a size of a room. This one is only crazier. Check it out here:
Safety
Almost at every I/O event, the primary focus of Google is to emphasise about how seriously they take user's privacy in account and how they focus on well being at individual's level. Currently, 2 billion active google accounts are secure by default and private by design, keeping you safe online. Incremental security updates helps in dealing with malware, cyber attacks and phishing, but there are some cool features that enhances the privacy experience.
- Automatic deletion of activity data after 18 months is by default now.
- Option to delete recent search history. Finally!
- Locked folder on photos.
- They are also aiming to have a password free future, where all you will need is your phone for authentication; password manager.
- A classic case of differential privacy is already employed at Google in the form of Federated learning. It allows models to train on the device and only the learned weights are transferred, no personal data ever leaves your device. Meaning, live captions occur without sharing voices.
Google claims to never sell your data, runs no ads on personal data, no sensitive information is ever compromised. Although privacy on internet is a myth but that shouldn't stop us from taking control where we can.
Search
Google search is no longer limited to text query input and ranked webpages output. Search today comprises of text, images, videos and more unstructured data. Not only a search engine but also a lens and an AR (Augmented Reality) system. At the backend, search understands multiple modes of information, using MUM (multitask unified model) which is 1000 times more powerful than BERT to unlock information, understand deep knowledge and generate responses in 75+ languages. Students use google lens to learn, AR in search was used 200M times alone. This year, sport artists in AR are to be launched. So, now you can see your favourite player practising their moves on your phone's screen. One important thing that search will have is, the ability to evaluate credibility of source, to produce reliable information in search results.
Maps
Google is the only company having AR navigation in maps, which gives live information about places you point your camera to. This year, we will have detailed street signs, key landmarks integrated in the maps as well. Sidewalks and crosswalks will be seen as well. Live view is coming indoors, meaning, now you can navigate in malls and airports very easily now.
Results on maps are going to be more dynamic and more tailored. For example, it will highlight coffee shops in the morning, basically filter based on what time of the day it is and whether you are travelling or not. It will highlight business in the area. Personally, after search, Maps is the most used google product and is an important part of my lifestyle.
Shop Online
Everything is online, and best thing in this pandemic has been the ability to get anything we want by shopping online. Not having to step out even for essentials has literally been life saving. Google is trying to enhance browsing and buying experience of its users. Showing information like price, reviews, product data from various websites. Ability to search a product from a screenshot using lens. Chrome being able to open shopping cart from past searches. All this is done of course with the help of AI based knowledge graph. They have also released a shopping graph dataset, it will be interesting for folks working in retail domain AI research.
Google Photos
Google says, around 4 trillion photos and videos are stored in Photos. Pretty wild isn't it? It's obvious that rediscovering important moments through that huge pile is difficult. Again, AI is used to resurface these memories. It find little patterns in every user's collections and then it groups similar photos to show as moments. We have cinematic photo, smooth gif and NOW more control over what we want to see in those refactored moments. Making reminiscing more inclusive. Ability to hide photos of some people and from certain time periods. Relieving!
Android 12 & Material You
There are 3 billion active android devices right now, and what if I told you, now every one of them is going to have their own UI design? Well, not really but in a way that's made possible by MY (material you). The look and feel of all apps, icons, whole android design is going to be personally customised. Here's a small sneak peak. Read more.
If you are an android enthusiast you may want to check out this detailed article. The key changes I found interesting in the new "Snow Cone" is UX personalisation, motion and animation improvement, their efforts to make it more faster, private and secure. There's a privacy dashboard and an indication when microphone and cameras are being used by any app. Pretty Cool!
Miscellaneous
A big company like Google will never have enough of what it can do with technology. They are also not alone, partnerships with big firms like Samsung has resulted in Wear OS, a Samsung unified platform for consumer experience. FitBit acquisition opens up access to world class health and fitness. Project Starline is that one cool tech where when virtually talking to people will feel like they are in front of you for real. Spooky!
All that tech is cool, but what matters most (at least to me) is how all these exponential advancements in the world of technology are going to be sustainable for our future. I'm happy that Google has been considerate of that since 2007, when it became a carbon neutral company. By 2017 it was running on renewable energy. 2030 is the projected year when it is going to run completely on carbon free energy. As of today, there are 5 data centres that are running on carbon free electricity. Not just this, Google has incorporated carbon intelligent load shifting in Google cloud. Based on time and place, non production services are automatically going to shift to places where renewable energy will power them. They are experimenting with geothermal energy in their geo thermal power project. Something to look out for definitely!
Thank you reader! Until next year's google I/O, keep enjoying google services and their new updates :)
I have covered the event in past years as well, if you wish to compare google's progress follow below links (check them out for fun, I am surprised at how surprised I was about things that have become so normal now) :