After the final clap of the Google developer conference, the Google I / O 2018 was under the sign, as trends in recent years have shown, the rise and range of artificial intelligence but especially vocal assistants. The giant Mountain View has made 100 ads, SocialNetLink magazine has identified 5 interesting for the BtoB area in Africa and the ecosystem of start-ups.
The developer’s conference ball opened in May with its announcement batch, first with Facebook’s F8, followed by Google I / O and soon (on June 4th, exactly) from Apple’s WWDC in USA. Opportunity for these technology firms, who now govern all parts of our lives, to put us in the mirror, with news, updates, announcements thunderous and daydreams in 3 dimensions. It’s also a good opportunity for SocialNetLink to follow live events like Google I / O (Internet eh!), To give its loyal readers, IT decision-makers and start-up companies some food for thought, among the anthology of announcements, which necessarily , will enter into our future uses or change our practices and thus avoid you being in a vortex of new terms.
>> 1 / Google Assistant
8 major announcements related to Artificial Intelligence have been made. More and more self-learning devices or systems will arrive and they will be more and more fed with our data to offer us “adapted” features pretending to make our life easier, or even soon to hold hands. And that’s where we talk about Google Duplex, the most bluffing thing that Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated during the conference.
Google Duplex is a new feature that will be tested this summer in the Google Assistant to help you make bookings, schedule appointments, and get vacation hours from businesses. Just provide the date and time, and your assistant will call the company to coordinate for you. Duplex is going to hold hands with us since its AI is becoming more and more conversational thanks to WaveNet technology. Perfect combination of voice synthesis, anthropometric research, contextualization and endowed with human mimicry, Google Duplex would be able to hold a conversation like a human being.
We would have gone beyond the stage of the voice command which is more and more controlled by firms in closed ecosystems (Google Assistant for TV, Apple Car Play, Cortana), to arrive with Google Duplex has real voice assistance .
Conversations + Opportunities to do tasks, this combination would be very interesting within companies especially in HR services and customer relations.
If the Mountain View company opens the APIs of its new products as usual, Google Assistant will eventually win the battle of Voice Assistants, facing Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana.
>> 2 / Google Map
Google Maps is becoming more and more personal. An Explore tab contains everything you need to know about restaurants, events and activities in the areas you are interested in. New features also make it easy to create plans as a group. Create a list of places in the app and share it with friends on any platform, so you can vote quickly and decide where to go becomes a breeze.
Start-ups who work or offer similar services will have to worry, but local SMEs can in the long run do without a good old website to focus almost exclusively on their presence on Google’s geolocation service.
>> 3 / Google Lens
It’s a kind of shazam of everyday life applied and integrated into the camera (underneath Androïd obviously). Imagine you go out into the street, into a city you do not know, you take a picture of a building, and your smartphone tells you the name of that building. Congratulations ! You have Google Lens. A “universal” recognition technique of any object photographed. Wow!
“Google Lens now uses real-time identification to help you navigate the world around you by pointing your camera. It is able to quickly give you information and anchor them in the things you see. “Google
For the local business insert information about a product image becomes accessible. Also with Sceneform, Java developers can now create immersive 3D applications without having to learn complex APIs. They can use it to create AR (Augmented Reality) applications from scratch and add functionality to existing ones.
>> 4 / Google Lookout
Technology is not only for people who are valid. It is for the human being as a whole, sometimes we forget the notion of ACCESSIBILITY, big companies including. Google wants to advance on this niche because there are more than 253 million people blind or visually impaired in the world, with Google Lookout.
“Our new Lookout Android App, coming to the US Play Store this year, helps people who are blind or visually impaired become more independent by giving them auditory cues when they encounter objects, text and people around them. “Google
This is probably the continuity of Google Lens applied to accessibility features that is used here.
>> 5 / The Flutter SDK
The Google I / O is primarily an annual developer conference and we can not make a selection of new features without talking about SDK and API and SDK. Google has launched Flutter Beta 3, the latest version of its mobile app SDK to create high quality native user experiences on iOS and Android.
Conclusion
For the African continent, all these technical innovations will continue for a long time to keep us in the ecosystem of Google. Indeed as good and advanced as they are, we could say that each of these technologies represent thousands of local startups. It is obvious that parts of the digital economy will suffer. Pessimistic note may be but it’s reality.
SocialNetLink
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