Always enjoy the possibilities that I/O shows

Other impressive things:

- "where did I leave my glasses?" (live video feed with memory)

- asking for a summary across emails / meetings

- agent demos (like handling all the steps to return shoes, building physics learning examples based on user provided preference "basket ball")

- "why is my record player doing this?" (ask question while recording video, get genAI response with links)

- Google Workspace Gemini Panel (like that it sits on the side rather than taking over the UX)

- Build a JSON object of books & authors from a picture of a bookshelf

- Context caching for model calls (saves sending large amounts of text for every call)

Google Astra seems like it will be the foundation for a number of next gen capabilities

100%.

Google has "demoed" dozens of seemingly world-changing products that lead nowhere (remember Google Duplex?). It's impossible to ascertain from an event like this the extent to which demos are cherrypicked or faked entirely.

They used to launch products at Google IO, then over the years it shifted into previews (some of which didn't eventuate, like Duplex), and now it's just demos of stuff they might turn into a product one day.

Is there a single thing that they showed at Google IO this year that can be used right now?

Gemini 1.5 Pro is available right now: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-15-pro-now-avail...

I think Duplex is still in use; it's just in the background doing its thing.

They might (maybe?) be using it to check/update open hours for places on Google Maps, but you can't make reservations using any of Google's Assistants.

It feels a bit like this tech event I've always been looking forward to died to be honest. IO was always cool, you could always see general product updates, but this year seems to be AI only. Half of the talks/videos will also be AI focussed, it's a bummer because it's always a source to learn new SDKs or design ideas through them.

All the video understanding and agentic stuff (if it actually works at low-enough latency in real life) is very impressive.

Put this on a robot, call it Jeeves, and it becomes a pretty cool personal assistant :)

Looks great, but I've become skeptical of Google demos and as such will believe it only after I've used it :)

Every year they demo lots of things I never see later.

My thoughts:

- Is this the first I/O that released _zero_ new hardware?

- Very very sad to see them make EVERYTHING in this conference about Gemini

- Google video search is crazy interesting

- Google Search being AI-first is definitely not.

They have released Pixel 8a and you can remove AI from Google Search by clicking the Web filter.

I used to look forward to it. I liked Google positioning with its Pixel line up, their prosumer software and what they cooked in the lab (AI, Project Starline)

Now I don't even bother navigating through the announcements that are never launched, the fake demos, the tiptoeing around every potential issue... What a shame.

Underwhelming so far, everything is disjointed and is months away from being available via labs.

I thought Gemini 1.5 Pro is available immediately, and the Workspace stuff is coming in 1 month.

Fair point if you are talking about the video understanding stuff, I don't know when that's coming.

It's just missing the wow factor, they can still turn it around if the rumors about the new pixie assistant are true but so far yesterday's preemptive OpenAI event seems like it was unnecessary.

Google is becoming a Toyota. Useable, but utterly behind.

Who is Toyota behind?