After Android, Google's New Future Is AI in Everything | Google I/O

The new operating system, Android N, was the least noticeable thing at the event.

Google's annual developer conference, now in its ninth year, was bigger than it has ever been. It moved from the indoor convention center Google used before to the Shoreline Amphitheatre, which holds more than 20,000 people.

Ten outdoor booths and product demo areas were set up around the venue, and the event will run for three straight days.

But at an event this big, Android was no longer the star. In the two-hour keynote, Android N got 17 minutes — less than the new chat app Allo.

A beta of Android N had come out two months before the conference, so Google left no suspense about it on stage. The event did not even mention the latest Android user numbers.

So what future did Google paint this year?

What Is Google Betting On This Year?

The words Google CEO Sundar Pichai repeated most on stage were natural language processing (NLP, which lets computers understand what you say), artificial intelligence, and machine learning (the method used to train artificial intelligence).

Unlike in past years, the first product Google announced was not a new version of Android but a virtual assistant, the Google Assistant — an intelligent assistant that works on phones, TVs, watches, and even home devices.

Sounds just like Siri? Right — but better.

In Pichai's demo on stage, the Google Assistant handled natural language well. All of these questions, for instance, returned good results:

• Is the book Jungle Book any good? (showed book reviews)
• Is this restaurant kid-friendly? (showed restaurant bookings and reviews)
• Who directed The Revenant? (search results)

The Google Home Smart Speaker

Next came Google Home, a smart speaker you control with your voice. It goes on sale in the second half of this year.

Google Home does exactly what Amazon's Echo does — the speaker Amazon launched earlier and that Silicon Valley currently thinks highly of.

Its main features:

• Music and video: playing music from Spotify, Pandora, and other services, and videos from YouTube.
• Daily chores: alarms, to-do lists, changing the time of a restaurant reservation, flight-change alerts.
• Google search: basically what Siri does, but judging by the demo video and by Google Now's record so far, it will be much better.
• Controlling smart home devices: direct control of smart light bulbs, Nest, and other smart home products.

Against Amazon Echo or Siri, Google Home's main advantage may be better voice control and better search.

For now, though, Google handles third-party integrations itself, talking to each service directly; it has not opened them to developers.

Google executives said on stage that Google Home will be the entry point to Google's smart home in the future. The new product came out of the Chromecast team, and the smart home platform Google built around Nest went unmentioned.

A Virtual Reality Development Platform — This Fall

Two years ago, I/O launched Cardboard, a VR (virtual reality) viewer made of paper. The Cardboard app has now been downloaded 50 million times.

Google believes VR's future has to be tied to the phone, not to a device wired to a high-performance PC. What Google did this time was build a platform for mobile VR, a market still a few years off. It is called Daydream.

The platform has three parts:

• Hardware standards: only phones whose sensors, screens, and processors meet the requirements can pass Daydream Ready certification.
• Headset design: from the picture, a reference headset much like Samsung's Gear VR, with a remote control.
• Software: Android optimized for virtual reality, and the Play Store readied for the apps that go with it.

Google has also made its own VR apps: Street View, Google Play Movies, Google Photos, and YouTube will all get VR versions.

The Chat App Allo — This Summer

Google is making a chat app again, and this time the selling point is artificial intelligence.

Besides making it easier to drop in emoji and to shrink or enlarge them as you go, Allo's biggest feature is "Smart Reply": it learns how you talk and writes your answers for you — text, or an emoji — ready to send with one tap.

Thanks to Google's artificial intelligence, Allo can recognize a photo the other person sends. In the demo, the other person sent a photo of a dog.

Allo popped up three replies: "What a cute dog!", "Aww!" and "Beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog."

Brushing someone off just got easier — no longer just "heh," "going to take a shower" and "…"

More interesting is that Google put restaurant booking and location sharing right in Allo's chat window: you can pick a restaurant and book it inside the conversation. And in a chat with friends, you can call up the Google Assistant any time.

This app's direct rivals are Facebook's WhatsApp and FB Messenger. The two apps already have more than a billion users worldwide.

The Video Chat App Duo — This Summer

One instant messaging app was not enough: Google also announced Duo today, a video chat app that works on both iPhone and Android.

Its headline feature shows you a live view of the caller before you pick up. In the presenter's words, the conversation starts early.

Duo comes from the team behind WebRTC, the network communication protocol.

Android N

This is Google's tenth year of making the Android operating system, and because a developer preview of Android N came out back in March, today's session spent only about 15 minutes running through the new features again:

• A faster underlying architecture that cuts app launch times by 50%;
• Encryption of all files, to protect your privacy;
• Seamless automatic updates to Android, so you no longer install security updates by hand;
• Double-tap the multitasking button to jump straight back to the previous task;
• Multi-window, meant for tablets originally, now on phones too;
• 72 new emoji, including an avocado and politically correct emoji for women's professions;
• A health hub that pools data such as heart rate and weight for other apps to use;
• Replying to someone straight from the notification bar when a notification arrives.
• Android Instant Apps: no download, no install — tap a link and try the app.

Smartphones are mature now, and Android and iOS have spent two or three years copying each other to fill in gaps. Most of what Android N brings this time iOS has already done.

Google I/O: From a Developer Conference to an Android Conference to a Conference About the Future

Look back at the first conference in 2008: Google executives spent almost all of the keynote on tools for building web apps.

Up to 2010, Google I/O still spoke from the developer's point of view, and the purpose of the event was to get them to build more apps.

Since 2011, though, the event has gradually become the stage where Google sketches its blueprint of the future. Alongside developer tools, the things that matter more to consumers — Android, web services, hardware — have taken up more and more of the time.

• In 2011, Google talked mostly about Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chromebook.
• In 2012, the Google Glass smart glasses, plus Google Now and the Google Nexus Q.
• In 2013, Google Play and the new Google Plus.
• In 2014, Android One, Android Wear, Android Auto, Android TV, and Cardboard VR.
• In 2015, Android Pay, Project Brillo, and Project Jump (a VR camera made of 16 GoPros strapped together).

Why Is Google in Such a Hurry to Find a New Future?

Since the first developer conference in 2008, Google's market value has grown nearly fivefold, and lately it has been fighting Apple for the title of the world's most valuable company.

Eight years ago, Android had only just shipped its first phone, to a flat reception. Today, counting the Chinese-made Android phones with Google services stripped out, Android is closing in on 2 billion users. Through search and Android, Google shapes the lives of billions of people.

But it is still, through and through, an advertising company: 90% of its revenue still comes from advertising. Just as the iPhone does for Apple, one source of income holds up the whole company — and with internet users outside China already using Google's services and smartphones, there is not much room left for user growth.

The other problem: unlike in the PC era, a smartphone user opens a specific app first, not search. Social apps in particular take up more and more of people's time. Worldwide, Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram have taken most of it. In China, WeChat plays that part.

In short, the search engine matters less and less. You can see it in mobile advertising revenue: ad growth at Facebook and WeChat is far ahead of Google's and Baidu's. Days before the conference, Facebook said it would supply video ads to several big media companies — a move straight into Google's business.

On the strength of the Android store and a mobile ad market nobody had tapped earlier, Google's revenue will keep growing for a while. But without a new source of income, it will hit a ceiling. Of that there is no doubt.

That is why we have watched Google roll out new products year after year, from the Google+ social network to a wholly new hardware platform like Google Glass — all of it a search for a future.

This Year, the Future Google Showed Is Artificial Intelligence in Every Product, Plus VR

One future is VR, which every tech giant is now working on.

Oculus is convinced that high-performance, high-priced PC VR headsets are the answer. Google thinks mobile VR built on the phone is the future, even though phones are nowhere near powerful enough.

VR will not catch on soon. What Google is doing today is making sure that when it does, the world will not go around Google.

But artificial intelligence matters more.

"Voice assistants, Amazon Echo, messaging apps — this is Other People's Ideas Conference 2016," Casey Newton of The Verge wrote during the event.

He is not wrong. The assistant's conversations are no different in kind from Siri's, every selling point of Google Home is also a selling point of Amazon Echo, and Allo, with a chatbot added, looks a lot like WhatsApp in many places.

Then again, Google Photos, launched last year, was nothing new either — photo albums are hardly rare. Yet a year after its launch Google Photos had drawn 200 million users.

Google Photos worked because artificial intelligence gave it features no one else had: recognizing images and sorting photos of buildings, pets, or one particular person; cutting a video together for you; retouching, cropping, and filtering your pictures for you...

Every new product Google announced today works the same way: use artificial intelligence to improve an existing kind of product, and try to win users with an experience that feels completely different.

Artificial intelligence, the strength Google has been talking about for years, has left the lab for more finished, everyday products. Day after day, year after year, trillions of searches have given Google chances to train artificial intelligence that no rival has.

And with Gmail, search, and Maps each counting more than a billion users worldwide, Google can know every person's details and habits — your schedule, your tastes, your home address, where you work, the words you choose... all of it filed away and used in its newest products.

Artificial intelligence cannot guarantee that every product will succeed.

But no other company today has a better foundation for pushing artificial intelligence into the products we use every day.

Cover image from Visual China Group