Google I/O started on Tuesday, the opening day of the company’s annual developer conference. During the keynote event, the company’s executives also revealed some notable new features coming to Android handsets in the coming months — surprisingly, the company did not reveal Android 15 features during the inaugural event.
These developments come ahead of the company’s next big smartphone operating system update, which is scheduled to arrive in the second half of 2024. As expected, Google plans to bring new AI-powered capabilities, continuing on the path it established with Android 14 last year.
At the Google I/O presentation, Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Google, highlighted new AI-powered capabilities that would be available on Android smartphones in the coming months. One of the most impressive features shown is an upgrade to Circle to Search, the company’s visual lookup function that is now only available on select Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones, which will allow kids to ask for assistance with their assignments.
Google says its LearnLM technology will allow users to circle a prompt to solve “problems involving symbolic formulas, diagrams, graphs, and more”; the feature is expected to be available later this year.
Gemini, the company’s AI model that can run on Android smartphones, is also being updated. The company claims that Gemini for Android will soon be able to deliver information about YouTube videos, and AI-generated images may be rapidly added to Gmail and Messages. Meanwhile, users will be able to utilize Gemini Advanced to get answers from PDF documents without having to scroll through several pages, thanks to a new “Ask this PDF” feature, according to the company.
Google Pixel devices will also get support for Gemini Nano with Multimodality, the company’s most recent model for on-device AI processing. In addition to text input, Pixel phones will be able to comprehend contextual information such as visuals, sounds, and even spoken words.
AI is also making its way into Google’s most basic smartphone tool, the dialer. In a demo exhibited at the Google I/O 2024 keynote event, the company demonstrated the capacity to detect a potential scam call requesting that a user transfer or reveal banking information over the phone.
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The feature was shown to work in real-time and on-device to safeguard user privacy. Google hasn’t said when these functions will be available to customers, or which (probably Pixel) smartphones will be supported.
According to the company, Google TalkBack, an accessibility feature on Android smartphones, would be boosted even more by Gemini Nano’s multimodal characteristics. The service will allow visually challenged users to obtain more specific information about images by entering information about unlabeled photographs.
Google claims that these new capabilities will work on-device, which implies that users will be able to benefit from the enhanced capability even when they do not have internet connectivity. There is no fixed launch date for the new Google TalkBack service powered by Gemini Nano with Multimodality, but the company believes it will arrive “later this year”.