Google I/O 2024: Launches & Announcements

Google’s 2024 I/O developer conference revolved around AI announcements. Here are the biggest announcements made at its annual developer-focused event.

Revamped AI Search. Google’s search experience is first in line for a revamp, with AI Overviews rolling out in the US this week. Last year, Google introduced AI-generated summaries, but the new AI features in Search promise to summarize the web for more complex queries.

Ask Photos assistant. Set to roll out this summer, Ask Photos can browse through one’s archive to fulfill simple requests like finding their license plate’s number and more complex ones like “When did Lucia learn to swim?” with follow-up requests like “Show me how Lucia’s swimming has progressed.”

Longer context windows. Available to all developers globally as part of Gemini Advanced, Google introduced longer one million context windows with Gemini 1.5 Pro along with quality improvements across reasoning, translation, and coding. Google is also making a two million-token context window available for developers in private preview.

AI voice call scans. Google showcased a demo of a call scam detection feature that scans voice calls on the client side in real time with AI. A similar technology sparked backlash on iOS in 2021, resulting in Apple withdrawing it. Privacy advocates have warned that malicious actors could misuse it.

LearnLM. This new family of generative AI models is designed to “conversationally” assist students in learning different subjects and help teachers explore ideas, activities, and materials tailored to specific student needs.

Security improvements. Google announced new security and privacy protections for Android. These include more safeguards for screen sharing, stronger protection against cell site simulators, and on-device live threat detection for malicious apps. The company is also rolling out the Theft Detection Lock technology that uses AI to identify motions commonly associated with theft. When such motion is detected, the phone screen locks, preventing future use.

Gemini in Workspace. For example, users can rely on Gemini within Gmail for simple tasks like searching and summarizing and more complex actions like processing an e-commerce return.

Other Gemini updates include a new experience called Gemini Live, which enables users to engage in “in-depth” voice chats with the chatbot on their phones and improved image analysis. Additionally, Google announced Audio Overviews in NotebookLM that can generate more personalized and interactive audio conversations.

It’s worth noting that days before Google’s I/O took place, OpenAI unveiled its new GPT-4o model that can reason across audio, videos, text, and images and engage in more natural and conversational ways with users.