Google Keynote I/O 2023
I had the opportunity to watch Google’s keynote (I/O 2023) Live today. This iteration and implementation of Google’s AI tools is going to change the way we do a lot of things. There are so many cool features that will be available for everyone to use, many of them for free.
Google laid out a number of products and features that are incredible. These tools use AI to help consumers with everyday things like search and entertainment as well as helping business and developers streamline their processes.
Google has a test suite G.co/labs where you can test out some of these new software options.
Search, workspace, project tailwind and MusicLM. These work in combination with Google AI, Google Research and Bard. They also spoke about Magic Image editor an AI assisted image editor and composer, Bard a tool to help with code development, magic composer an AI writing tool as well as AI generative and cinematic wallpapers.
Google also Introduced the Google 7a, Pixel tablet, and the Google Pixel Fold. The 7a is boasting a 72% bigger camera sensor and at an attractive starting price of $499. The Pixel Tablet along with its docking speaker are just $499 and comes with chromecast built in to allow for seamless casting of video to a larger screen if you want to share something you are enjoying with your friend or partner. The Pixel fold is starting at $1799 and comes with the Pixel watch when you pre-order the device.
Gmail and Magic
Gmail includes the new feature Help me Write. Help me Write uses AI to help compose email responses based on text you are replying to. The example given at the keynote was responding to an airline, you set a prompt that you are trying to get a full refund and gmail pulls in information from the previous email to expand on what you wrote out and write out a response to the Airline.
Magic compose can add an element of style to your texts, which allow you to mimic styles or include emojis effortlessly. You could have it take something you write and change its style to model Shakespear, which could create some hilarious moments to be sure.
Maps is now delivering a feature that zooms in to give an immersive view of the planned route and allow you to see the predicted weather and traffic to plan for anything. It will be launching in 15 cities to start.
Magic eraser allows you to remove unwanted distractions from photos and magic editor allows you to even edit out things you are wearing and adjust the image to change your location or fill in missing parts of an object and adjust the lighting.
PaLM 2
This is Google’s Large Language Model, trained on over 100 languages, math and science. It can be fine tuned to work for specific tasks. Examples given were medical knowledge and cyber security. It is paired with Bard to make it more expansive and have less limits in scope allowing it to use math, logic and reasoning.
Search
Search is something we all use and it is getting a massive overhaul. Using the power of Bard and AI. Allowing you to search very specific long tail questions that you would ask a person. With the help of AI search is able to take those questions and generate very specific results helping you to find exactly what you are looking for.
Bard
Bard Boasts to know over 20 programming languages, supposedly making it easy to write code for anyone. The example given was programming chess moves using Python. It was able to easily write out a code demonstrating a scholar’s mate. The most important feature in bard is the ability to use dark theme.
I think the more practical use will probably be for extrapolating out repetitive code snippets and to speed up certain coding processes and perhaps to make quick write outs of simple functions for people that already know how to program. I don’t really see normal users creating code on the fly, though they may use it for specific use cases. I do think it will open up a lot of possibilities for people that don’t have extensive coding knowledge to do basic functions. I also think it will help save knowledgeable coders time in some scenarios.
Bard does have tools that pair with Google’s search, lens, maps etc to help compile your searches and quickly set up your research. Google is also expanding its capabilities to work with many other partner apps across the web.
Overall it is an impressive feature that will be a major benefit to most users, even if you don’t use it yourself, it will allow other people to express their ideas in a multitude of new ways with their current intuition and without having to learn a new language.
You can try it out now and get it to design a birthday cake or have it write a song for you among other things at bard.google.com
Workspace
Integrating AI with the common tools we use, Docs, sheets and slides is seamless. It helps with prompts for writing, it can create a data pivot table for you with a prompt from one sheet to another and can create images to help with your presentations or even create speaker notes with slides you put together.
If you start a story and get stuck, it can generate ideas to help continue the story you are working on and can even generate images that fit your story’s theme. It’s not only useful, it is impressive. I am excited to start using these tools.
The Future for AI, A Demonstration of Bard
(The following was written by Bard)
In conclusion, Google I/O 2023 was a major milestone for Bard, Google’s large language model. Bard was unveiled for the first time at the keynote, and it has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers. Bard can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. It is still under development, but it has already learned to perform many kinds of tasks, including
- Brainstorming ideas, developing a plan, or finding different ways to get things done.
- Getting a quick, easy to understand summary of more complex topics.
- Creating first drafts of outlines, emails, blog posts, poems, and much more.
As Bard continues to learn, it will become even more powerful and versatile. It has the potential to change the way we work, learn, and communicate. It is an exciting time to be a part of the Bard community, and I am looking forward to seeing what Bard can do in the years to come.
Conclusion
This is me again, just wanting to show how powerful it is. I asked it to write a conclusion for this paper and then I asked to make the conclusion more about Bard. It was able to generate this in about five seconds. I don’t have AI write for me, but I did want to show how quickly it can generate paragraphs off of a prompt.
Regardless of your thoughts on Google’s new features that use AI to work with us, there is no doubt it will change the way we use and think about technology going forward.
There is a lot happening and I encourage you to go hear it from Google yourself here is a link to the keynote Google Keynote (Google I/O ‘23).
Best,
Chris
