Tech giant Google held its annual I/O developers conference I/O 2016 from May 18 to May 20. The well-known 3-day-event for developers all over the world kicked off with a 2 hour keynote by Google CEO Sundar Pichai who showcased previews of Google’s latest products such as Google Assistant, Google Home, two messaging technologies Allo and Duo, and many more.
Google’s focus of this year’s conference was on how to make people’s life easier by offering them the right tools that can assist them at the right time and help them with small household tasks such as order movie tickets, make dinner reservations, check their flight tickets, etc.
"Google Home is the stake in the ground in Google bringing a smart assistant into the home -- and in the bigger picture, a connected life within the future smart home that is built around their interfaces,” Paul Erickson, senior analyst at IHS Technology said for TechNewsWorld. “A connected speaker is only one manifestation of that -- a Google voice interface could just as easily be part of mic-equipped smart appliances, smoke detectors, thermostats, and AV devices from different brands,” he added.
Trying to launch new products as a firm response to its competitors such as Amazon and Facebook, which are using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to their best interest, Google is making its best to help users with household tasks so that they can in turn focus on more important things going on in their lives.
“Progress in all of these areas is accelerating, thanks to profound advances in machine learning and AI, and I believe we are at a seminal moment,” Pichai told I/O attendees adding that over the last 10 year Google has evolved enormously and that is why he believes that during the next ten years, Google will take even bigger steps and “take a big leap forward.”
Last year Google announced that the company is applying AI and ML in various areas, and making investments in AI and ML a priority. The company reported back in September 2015 a great progress in image classification and speech recognition capabilities of artificial neural networks.
Compared to last year’s event Google I/O 2015 that was attended from over 6,000 developers from all over the world, this year the number of attendees was over 7000, and number of women attendees reached 23%, a lot more compared to the approximately 8% of women attendees during the last few years.
"There are over 7,000 of you joining in person today," Pichai announced at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. “It's packed here, but that's nothing. The outdoor concert venue's capacity is 22,500.” The event this year was also live streamed to 530 external events in more than 100 countries worldwide with “over 1 million people tuning live in from China."