The first day of Google annual I/O developer conference took place on the 8th of May at Mountain View, California. The keynote delivered by Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google, underlined the usage of AI to create better experience for users. One of the key highlight at the conference was Google Duplex, a technology that enables Google's virtual assistant to conduct natural conversation with a human over the phone while completing some real tasks given by a user. This was demonstrated through a demo where the assistant made a call on behalf of the user to book an appointment with a hair salon. In this context Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google, said “We have been working on this technology for many years. It brings together all our investments over the years on natural language understanding, deep learning, and text speech.” To make Google Assistant more user friendly, a feature of “continued conversation” was introduced where a user would not have to say ‘OK Google’ repeatedly and can follow up the conversation. Google also put the spotlight on bringing 6 new voices for assistant using wavenet, including one from singer John Legend. Similarly, the concept of multiple actions, which allowed the Google assistant to do various activities simultaneously, was introduced. Some of the upcoming updates include-

• Google Maps- One can use the assistant to send an ETA (estimated time of arrival) to someone with a voice request, send text messages, and play music and podcasts from within the app, via voice commands.

• Google News- Google will curate a news feed based on your reading history, and a "Full Coverage" tab will bring in more links for a deeper dive.

• Gmail- “Smart compose” feature in Gmail, which provides to auto complete a sentence through predictive texts by pressing the tab key.

• Google Photos- The new feature allows for fixing brightness and colour pop in one tap, converting document to pdf, send multiple photos in one tap.

• Android P- The new version of Android will include a dashboard that will give you detailed information on how much time you spend using various apps and even allow you to set limits on how much you can use any given app. “Adaptive Battery” and “Adaptive Brightness” are the key features included in this.