Share

Google Assistant: all new features

The Android Dashboard will give you an overview of how you’re spending time on your device, including how much time you’re devoting to certain apps, how many times you unlock your phone and how many notifications you’re getting. Pichai said that users will no longer have to say “Hey Google” every single time they need something, allowing for actual back-and-forth conversations. Google said it will also make it easier to subscribe to news organizations directly from its app store, taking another swing at streamlining the subscription process. Smart text selection will let you point your phone at a restaurant menu or Wi-Fi password card and copy and paste the text it recognises. These calls were also demonstrated and it was seen to handle the calls gracefully. This feature will be available on Android by summer, company leaders said, and on iOS later this year.

Advertisement

The more the app is used, the better it gets at selecting stories for you.

Today, at Google I/O 2018, Google has spent a large chunk of the presentation to talk through all the new features coming to the Google Assistant, which is becoming clearly a more and more important product for the company.

Perhaps the biggest, and our personal favorite, change in Android P comes in the navigation.

At the Google I/O 2018 keynote on Tuesday, May 8 (May 9, Manila time), the company showed off how its overhauled Google News aims to add artificial intelligence to your daily news cycle. Google Assistant will also notify you once the order is placed. The adaptive battery feature uses machine learning to predict what apps are more relevant to be running in the background for you.

The biggest news of the opening day will be what’s Google has in the latest generation of Android, codenamed “P”. It is now built directly into the native camera app, rather than sitting within Google Photos. Google will also let you set timers for each app on your phone, and will alert you when the time is up.

Google Lens was created to surface relevant information using visual analysis. Basically, your phone will keep an eye on when and how much you adjust the brightness level throughout the day and in the future, update it to match your habits.

In February, Google began to offer cloud customers access to Cloud TPUs, which put four custom chips together to provide 180 teraflops of performance. Photos and Google Lens are slated for their significant updates very soon, too. So, for instance, if you’ve disabled auto-rotation and you try to watch a video, you can simply tap the new button instead of enabling auto-rotation.

If you swipe up once more from the recent apps view, you’ll see all of your apps, but that’s not all.

Tapping on a food or drinks place will display your “match” which would tell you how likely it is that you will enjoy that place based on your past choices to eat and drink.

Advertisement

Waymo, Alpahabet Inc’s self-driving vehicle company, also made announcements during Google’s Keynote.

Google Assistant all new features