Google I/O is a technical conference held annually that focuses on specific and specialized requirements of users and developers. Every year Google comes up with some amazing technologies being a turning point for future inventions along with updating and upgrading the old ones.
Google I/O 2018 technical three-day conference was held on 8th of May 2018 at the Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View in San Francisco with great expectations. Google has rebranded its research division by emphasizing on artificial intelligence, focusing on natural language processing, R & D on computer vision and neural networks.
With the advent of new technologies and improvisation of existing one’s Google I/O 2018 has a lot to offer for App developers.
Google announced a new software development kit known as ML Kit, an essential tool for app developers on Android and iOS. It allows developers to access AI-powered features like text recognition, barcode scanning, face detection, image labeling and live locations. These kits are available online and offline with the offline being a turning point enabling developers to develop an app with artificial intelligence enabled features. App developers need not develop their own APIs for incorporation of AI features, rather they can use this cross-platform development ML kits on multiple platforms regardless of operating systems. Even developers with lack of knowledge and experience in machine learning can use ML kit to use these as insights.
Android Jetpacks is another interesting announcement that could prove to be a boom for developers. Jetpacks enable several management activities like lifecycle management and background tasks with negligible crashes and fewer memory leaks. These design guidelines can kick-start development of apps allowing them to complete difficult tasks and creating innovative designs in the least possible time.
The freshly launched Jetpack components include Work Manager, Navigation, Paging and Android KTX that will help developers to inculcate a modern approach to making future apps.
Slices is a continuing component of Android Jetpack that allows users to use main functions of the component without actually accessing the application. Google bar search is the platform used by Slices to access content. You can open the slices of appropriate applications whereby the user’s experience is more clarified and refined with the work being done with just a few taps. Slices have the capability to work with already installed apps on a device along with taking help from Google Assistant.
Google has announced its TPU machine learning hardware for new generation developers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed that the new TPU pod is eight times more powerful than the earlier version with 100 petaflops performance wise. With tools like TensorFlow or PyTorch the developers will have a definite advantage over their competitors by speeding up their operations helping Google to include them in their ecosystem.
Besides technology advancements for app developers, several new features of Google are Google News gets a new AI-powered redesign, their ecosystem. Google’s Assistant allows continued conversation and when combined with YouTube will launch Smart Displays. Google Assistant is also coming to Google maps on both Android & IOS.
