If I had a penny for every time I heard “AI” or “Machine Learning” today, then I’d definitely be able to retire (not that I want to retire just yet – I like my job). Google are peddling AI into everything they do. They’ve been doing this for a while of course, but it seems they’ve taken it to a new level. (Spoiler, if you do nothing else today – watch this video).

And it’s really paying dividends, and no more so than in the other area they are peddling – Actions. An “action” is a natural language request made by a user; ie. where the user commands their device using words, either spoken or typed. People use Actions to control their Google Home, and can type or speak Actions into their mobile (or car, or IoT device etc etc). Google’s expectation is that Actions are going to become as important an input method as the Graphical User Interface that we have all been using for the last few decades. So they’re putting many tools in place to help developers get the most out of actions. DialogFlow is a great example which makes it easy to create an Action. A problem with Actions is thinking of all the different ways a user may phrase their question. With DialogFlow you give a number of representative examples, then Google’s AI takes over and automatically dreams up all the other ways in which the question may be posed.

Closely related to actions was the most fabulous demo, showing what can be achieved by combining many of Google’s capabilities and technologies. For a while now I have been waiting for Google to play their “definitive assistant card”. With all their years of data mining and categorisation, and AI, and knowledge engine, and search; you would have thought they could take a significant lead over Siri and Alexa. And now they have.

There was much anticipation of what would be in the new release of Android. There are two perspectives, the user and the developer. For the user, in my opinion, it is underwhelming (except for actions maybe). There isn’t really very much of significance, and an example of this was giving keynote air-time to really trivial feature changes (such as a slightly different volume bar). For the developer, there is more under the hood, and there was a really great presentation on some of the new improvements. I found the presenters’ honesty really refreshing on previous Android features that were excessively difficult to use. And their humour was good too. Here is the video.

That’s it for Day 1 at Google IO 2018!