Google’s transition to a subsidiary of Alphabet added focus to this year’s I/O conference. In previous years, I/O keynotes had a tendency to ramble, and the product lineup was at best tangentially related. This year there were clear through lines to product announcements and the keynote moved along briskly, finishing in two hours.
The slimmed-down Google is focusing on its strength in gathering and analyzing large sets of data. From the natural language processing of Google Home to the consolidation of its mobile support services under the Firebase brand, organizing and understanding information remains key.
Even a service like the new chat client Allo can be understood in that light. What at first glance feels like just another chat client becomes a lot more interesting when viewed through the prism of a playground for testing the Google assistant before considering a roll-out to mission-critical Google properties like search or mail.
In the midst of the Google’s platform development there were some clear opportunities for developers:
Firebase
Google’s announcement of Firebrand was the quiet surprise that no one saw coming. In 2014, Google acquired a small company called Firebase that offered a real-time database as an online service. This year, Google doubled-down on Firebase and rolled 14 separate online services under the Firebase brand.
In addition to the real-time database, Firebase includes features aimed at development, discovery and advertising (e.g. authentication, analytics, dynamic links and AdMob).
Firebase heavily leverages analytics and has strong support for both iOS and Android development. So, while most of Firebrand’s features are offered for free, expect Google to farm the data to better understand and target mobile users.
Firebrand’s platform includes several common and key components for Android development, like push notifications – it’s likely this will become a default install for most Android projects.
Google Cloud Machine Learning APIs
Google made a splash earlier this year when their DeepMind AI beat the Go world champion Lee Sedol. Google has been investing heavily in machine learning and is also exposing those platforms to the world.
This includes Google’s raw Cloud Machine Learning Platforms and already trained APIs specializing in speech, vision and translation. There were clear indications that more trained APIs will be forthcoming. Combined with the company’s focus on developing cloud services to rival Amazon’s, Google’s initiatives in machine learning will open doors to capabilities most companies would be unable to duplicate on their own.
Google Assistant Development
Few specific details have emerged about what development for the Assistant platform will entail, but we can expect to hear more about it this summer and fall. Looking at the implementation of Amazon’s competing Echo and Alexa voice service, we can make some assumptions. Google will likely handle the natural language processing and convert that to actionable commands. Development will include registering commands with the service and providing the logic to execute the command by either returning data (e.g. calendar appointments or the average airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow) or triggering an event (e.g. booking a reservation, turning on a light). Based on the recent success of the Alexa, this will be an interesting opportunity for a number companies to expand their reach and should be on most product owners roadmap to investigate.
Google I/O served as an introduction and first step for many of these platforms and technologies. It’s clear that for most of them, it’s just the first step. I look forward to learning more over the months to come. The company’s renewed focus on information gathering and analysis is starting to pay dividends.
The post What You Need to Know from Google I/O 2016 appeared first on The Nerdery Blog.
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