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We're T-minus 1 hour before the #GoogleIO keynote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNfINi5CNbY

Just a little over 30 minutes until #GoogleIO begins.

#GoogleIO will once again have a paired-down audience. It's only one day, not three. IIRC this is the first time since the pandemic Google has brought in live audience made up of non-Googlers?

Will the #GoogleIO livestream show pre-keynote crowd reaction shots like before, with attendees cheering and holding up their dev group signs?

#GoogleIO livestream update: Countdown has been replaced with pre-show from musician Dan Deacon...using generative AI to entertain the crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNfINi5CNbY

Musician Dan Deacon using Google's MusiLM, Phenaki and Bard AI tools to entertain the #GoogleIO crowd pre-keynote. The images behind him were generated using AI.

Dan Deacon: "I used Bard to ask how I could guide the visual representation for this event..."

"Don't pay attention to the fact that the bird has lips...the bird has lips..."

"Let's just imagine how much better the world can be if birds had lips and that the bird invited us to live with it..."

We're really tripping on something early in the morning...

#googleio opening act: Musician Dan Deacon talking about how he worked with Google to use #AI in his music-making.

And a bird with lips mascot enters the #googleio stage...

Seriously, you'd think this is something you'd see at the end of "Last Week Tonight"

What is going on this early in the morning?

Fun lil topical joke from musician Dan Deacon: "In the streets, it's Google Maps, but in the sheets, it's Google Sheets"

Derp.

The #googleio countdown to the keynote is back on.

LESS THAN 10 MINUTES!

Five minutes people!

1 minute!

And here we go! #googleio

Opening hype video about how Google is helping people discover information, searching for answers, editing photos, watching videos, etc.

And yes, "new breakthroughs in AI"

"Our goal is to make AI helpful to everyone"

Sundar Pichai is now on stage at #googleio

We're at an inflection point. We can make AI more helpful for everybody. We've been applying AI to make our products dramatically better...

First up is talking about generative #AI with Gmail —Pichai is recapping smart replies, smart compose.

Introducing "help me write": AI can read your email and produce replies. EG if your flight is canceled, "Help me write" can create a message that could dramatically help get you a refund.

Will start rolling out with Workspace updates.

Next up: Google Maps

Pichai recaps immersive view being released. Now expanding tech to help you get where you want to go. 20 billion km of directions provided every day. Imagine if you can see your trip in advance.

Immersive View for routes gives you a birds-eye view of your trip, check the day's air quality, see traffic and weather later on.

Launching by end of the year in 15 cities including London, Tokyo, and SF.

Google Photos update next: We already have image removal and later this year using contextual understanding and generative AI, you'll have "Magic Editor"

Holy crap...Google is making Photos app a pseudo competitor to Lightroom and Photoshop.

Magic editor for Google Photos is rolling out later this year.

Pichai: These Google products each serve over 2 billion people.

The four ways Google is viewing #AI and how it'll make it helpful for everyone.

Announcing PaLM 2: Builds on fundamental research and infrastructure. Highly capable of wide range of tasks. Over 25 products and features powered by PaLM 2 today.

So lightweight that it can work on mobile devices and even offline. Spans over 100 languages. Help developers collaborating around the world.

PaLM 2 is now available in preview. #GoogleIO

Pichai talks about the combo of teams into Google DeepMinds, saying that the teams contributed to many breakthroughs in #AI that led to the "inflection point where we are today."

Goes on to talk about Gemini that's still in development.

Mentions AI responsibility — having tools to identify synthetic content where you encounter it, such as watermarking. Pichai says moving forward all content will include watermarking and other info. Also, talks about metadata included in AI images. #googleio

Google Bard: Supports wide range of programming capabilities, gotten smarter at prompts and math problems. Now fully running on PaLM 2.

Now demo time to learn what's coming...

Sissie Hsiao (VP & GM, Assistant) on stage.

Bard can now collaborate on code generation, debugging and explaining code snippets. Learned more than 20 programming languages.

starting next week: code citations will be improved.

Dark theme is coming to Bard!

Google is launching two export features: Letting you export responses into Docs and Gmail.

In a way, yo u could do something similar with Bing/Edge/ChatGPT.

Announcing Bard+tools, meaning you can have extensions...so what you can do with ChatGPT. Starting with Google apps you use and love today.

Plus, Google is improving the UI so it's pulling from Photos and Knowledge Graph to present something visually better.

Google Lens is also coming to Bard — ask Bard to write funny captions of your doggos.

Google is really going hard after OpenAI and ChatGPT right now with extension support.

Will it be enough?

GOOGLE REMOVES WAITLIST FOR BARD.

Bard now supports Japanese and Korean languages.

Bard will soon support 40 languages. #GoogleIO

Google Workspace updates up next...talking about how you can collaborate with AI now.

"Help Me Write" is a big part of the updates.

Duet AI for Workspace coming later this year to Google Workspace.

#AI will soon provide you with prompts to help you write. It'll scan details from your document to generate images, suggested content, and more.

"Help me write" and "Duet AI" features are great but how much will these move the needle in Google's fight against OpenAI and Microsoft?

It really seems that Google is just leveraging its existing products. Its native apps are doing much of the heavy-lifting here.

These aren't bad updates...just not that major of a reveal IMO.

Sundar Pichai is back on stage at #GoogleIO.

Introducing Labs, a "new" program at google.com/labs.

Well that was...informative. Very few info about Labs.

Now onto talking about Search. Hopefully #AI talk here will be more impactful than with the Drive apps.

The way we search is not as conversational — you have to do a lot of heavy lifting, parsing through multiple links and queries.

But now search with #AI does the work for you...this resembles what Microsoft has with Bing/GPT. Hmm...

New experience builds on Google's rank and search systems.

Google has reimagined its search results page thanks to #AI, powered by not only its Knowledge Graph but also its Images database and Shopping Graph. Perhaps this is compelling enough to make this appealing.

But how does this update impact SEO and organic search results? I wonder if Google will provide answers and insights to marketers and businesses who could see their traffic drop considerably.

This new experiment, called "SGE" is available in Google Labs today.

Cool.

Pichai with the philosophical question: Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Cloud and #AI news...

We're just under an hour into the #googleio keynote right now...

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on stage talking about bringing #AI into the enterprise cloud space, highlights Vertex AI offering.

Google Cloud has a data-sharing feature with Salesforce to bring Einstein AI data into its platform to power Vertex AI.

Three new #AI models are being added to Cloud:

Imagen: image generation
Codey: code generation
Chirp: universal speech model

Also adding reinforcement learning into Vertex — incorporating human feedback to improve model's results.

Kurian introduces Duet AI for Google Cloud, serves as #AI expert for programming. Vertex uses Duet AI to provide developer assistance wherever you need it. Can help with auto completion, generate entire functions in real-time, can assist with code reviews/inspections.

@thekenyeung for example if I search for a specific product (like an out of print book or collectible) I don’t want links to similar items nor do I only want the biggest retailers (and I definitely don’t want shopping results that show links with prices and availability that are false or are for different products entirely). Shopping search is hard (as inventory changes quickly) but Google’s is particularly bad with more than 50% of most results I see on most searches being inaccurate or useless