Google at its annual developer’s event, Google I/O 2024 on May 14 made a lot of AI announcements. CEO Sundar Pichai dedicated the entire keynote talking about new AI features and enhancements for Android, Search, Workspace, Photos, and other Google services. The new developments which will have a major impact on how you use Google products. The major focus of the event was around Gemini and its integration with other Google apps. Here are the key highlights of the Google I/O 2024 keynote.
Google I/O 2024 key announcements:
- Ask Photos feature: Gemini in the Google Photos app will help users find images by providing a simple prompt to the chatbot. Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai also showcased how the feature will work with an example of finding a “ license plate number.”
- Gemini 1.5 Flash: It is Google’s lightweight AI-powered multi-model which is faster and cost effective. Google the AI model is optimised for “narrow, high-frequency, low-latency tasks.” It could conduct tasks such as summarisation, chat applications, image and video captioning, data extraction from long documents and tables, and more.
3. Gemini for Google Workspace: Google will be integrating Gemini 1.5 Pro into Workspace apps such as Docs, Gmail, Meet, Drive, and others. In Gmail, the chatbot will be able to summarise and reply to messages in seconds. These features will be available to Gemini Advanced users in June.
4. Gemini 1.5 Pro: Sundar Pichai announced that the powerful AI model will add a larger context window with 2 million tokens in a private preview, enabling the chatbot to conduct even more complex tasks such as analysing longer documents, codebases, videos, and more.
5. Project Astra: This announcement grabbed the attention of AI enthusiasts. Google showcased how “Project Astra” can be used for doing several day-to-day tasks. Project Astra is a multimodal AI assistant which functions via the device’s camera. The AI agent can be used for finding and locating things if it’s misplaced.
6. Gems: Google announced a chatbot creator which is being called “Gems,” enabling users to develop a personalised version of the Gemini assistant. Users can now customise how they want Gemini to respond in terms of personality, tones, or specialisation.
7. Veo: Google announced the new AI video generation tool which can create high-quality, 1080p resolution videos longer than a minute. The tool is designed to understand prompts based on different cinematic effects, variations, and more which is required to develop a pleasing video.
8. Gemini Nano to Chrome: Google also announced the integration of Gemini Nano to Chrome on desktop. It is a built-in assistant which will run on device, enabling users to generate text and it can also conduct tasks such as autofill.
9. Gemini on Android: Google said, that it will be adding a new AI-powered assistant to Android devices which will help users be creative and productive. The assistant will include features such as “Ask this video” or “Ask this PDF,” which can simply cater to user queries. These features will work on Gmail, Google Messages, and YouTube. Additionally, it will include scam detection.
10. Trillium: Google announced a sixth generation of Google Cloud TPU. It will provide improved compute performance per Trillium chip, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and most importantly, it will power the next generation of AI models.
11. Circle to search expands: The feature is more advanced and capable now as it can also help users solve a math problem on their screen and provide the right solution. Additionally, it will be available to more devices by the end of the year.
12. SynthID AI watermarking: The company is expanding the SynthID AI to Veo videos for watermarking and detecting AI-generated videos.