According to the news on May 12, Beijing time, skydiving, driverless, unlimited storage space of mailbox and photo album and predicted text are all exciting moments at the Google developer conference, but Google I / O seems to be a lot dull this year.
On Wednesday, the annual Google Developer Conference kicked off, and Google showed a more low-key side. Google in 2022 is more pragmatic and rational. It is more like focusing on its rival Microsoft in the business field than the dreamland of technology enthusiasts.
On the surface, this is intentional. The bold vision still exists, but it is still a long way from being realized. Today, professional managers in charge of Google pay more and more attention to extracting funds from R & D expenditure over the years.
Google founder brin used skydiving to show Google glasses
Google's biggest bet is in artificial intelligence, but at least for now, it doesn't mean that science fiction will become a reality. It just makes more subtle changes to existing products.
"AI is improving our products, making them more useful and accessible, and providing everyone with innovative new features." Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday.
Just be useful
Google once had a number of "moon landing projects" to try to solve major global problems, including driverless cars, high-altitude Internet balloons, smart cities, delivery drones and so on. Google's investment in these projects, known as "other bets", regardless of cost, has brought a lot of losses to the company.
However, Wednesday's conference lacked an "exclamation" moment. Google continues to emphasize that its products are "useful". In fact, Google executives used "useful", "helpful" or "useful" more than 50 times in their two-hour keynote speech, including "useful, necessary" in their marketing campaign for new hardware products
Google has launched a cheaper pixel smartphone, a smart watch with a circular screen, and a new tablet that will be launched next year. Google said it was "the most useful tablet in the world".
Midrange phone pixel 6A
The biggest applause for the keynote speech came from a new feature of Google documents, the company's artificial intelligence algorithm automatically summarizes a long document into a paragraph.
It is unclear how Google's other groundbreaking work will eventually lead to the next generation of computing touted by Google, such as a better understanding of the language model of natural dialogue, or technologies that can decompose tasks into logically smaller steps.
Evolution, not revolution
Of course, some new ideas do seem very helpful. When Google demonstrated how to continue to improve its search technology, it showed a function called "multi search". Users can take photos of a shelf full of chocolate, and then find the best rated black chocolate bar without nuts from the photos. In another example, Google shows how to find pictures of specific dishes, such as Korean fried noodles, and then search nearby restaurants that offer this dish.
Many functions are supported by Google's years of in-depth technical work through so-called machine learning, image recognition and natural language understanding. For Google and other large technology giants, this represents an evolution, not a revolution.
Many companies can establish digital services in an easier and faster way than in the past. This is because there are sharing technologies such as cloud computing and storage. However, the establishment of underlying infrastructure such as artificial intelligence language model is very expensive and time-consuming. Only companies with strong financial resources can invest in them.
As Google events usually show, it doesn't take a moment to explain how it makes money. After spending an hour announcing other news, Google raised the topic of advertising and highlighted a new feature called "my advertising center". It will allow users to ask certain brands to publish fewer advertisements or highlight the themes they want to see more advertisements. At present, advertising still accounts for 80% of Google's revenue.
At present, the overall situation of the industry is poor, and technology stocks have fallen sharply. Meta, Facebook's parent company, began to freeze recruitment and shrink the meta universe project. Online car Hailing giant Uber is also cutting costs and recruiting carefully. From this developer conference, Google is not as high-profile as before.