Highlights from 2018 tech conferences
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
Within a 10 days gap, the three biggest tech companies revealed their ambitions at their annual developer conferences. As usual, the saga started with Facebook F8 con-ference in the 1st week of May, followed by Microsoft Build in May 2nd week and continued with Google I/O in the same week. The saga usually ends with Apple WWDC and this year it's in the 1st week of June. What Apple is going to announce is yet to be unknown, but Facebook, Microsoft, and Google already announced their grand vision centered around two themes - AI and Cloud.
F8
Facebook announced a bunch of new things at F8 conference. Facebook will be roll-ing out opt-in dating functionality for the users who have declared themselves as sin-gle. A dating profile is different than Facebook profile and it will only use your first name. Dating profiles will be only visible to non-friends who also opted into dating. As it has more data than any other dating app out there, it could deliver more relevant matches based on preferences, things in common and mutual friends.
FB messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp will introduce group video chat to their plat-forms. Facebook will be introducing a feature called “Watch Party”, where a group of friends can watch live videos and chat together. Instagram group video chat could con-tinue even if the users use other features on the Phone. WhatsApp is also launching group video chat with stickers.
With 200k active developers and 300K active bots, Facebook Messenger is facilitating more the 8 billion messages between people and businesses each month. Real-time translation is coming to Messenger starting with English to Spanish conversations, thanks to the AI advancements in this field.
Facebook is building a new feature called “Clear History” to address data privacy is-sues. This feature allows users view all the data collected by Facebook and third par-ties using Facebook. Users can delete the history and choose Facebook to stop collect-ing it.
Microsoft Build
Microsoft wants every developer to be an AI developer. At Build 2018, Microsoft an-nounced a $25 million fund for developers to use the power of AI to help people with disabilities. It open sourced Azure IoT Edge Runtime and it announced AI developer kit that runs Azure IoT Edge.
Surprisingly, Windows 10 is coming with an app “Your Phone”, which ports your smartphone to the desktop. The phone is designed to bring a mirrored version of your smartphone (iPhone and Android) right on the desktop. You can access and receive texts, photos, and notifications and you can even transfer the data between phone and desktop using this app.
Pretty soon, Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana will work with Amazon’s Alexa. You will be able to speak to Cortana using Echo or you can reach Alexa from your Windows 10 desktop.
For years, all the big companies are taking 30% of the money an app brings in. Well, Microsoft is going to change that big time by reducing the cut to 5% (applicable to con-sumer apps only, games not included) and leaving a major chunk of 95% to develop-ers. It’s a huge incentive for developers.
Google I/O
Google stunned everyone with the announcement of Google Duplex - a virtual digital assistant that can actually place an appointment or call people in your contact list to place orders. With a natural sounding voice including affirmations and hesitations such as “hmm” and “er”, it is extremely difficult to differentiate between a digital assis-tant and human.
Google lens will come to many Android phones very soon via camera app. For some phones, it will be enabled as a special feature. For example, the LG G7 ThinQ contains an AI button shortcut to Google Assistant with one press and Google Lens with two presses.
Google news is getting revamped more like Flip board and Apple news like design. Leveraging machine learning, it will surface credible, reliable and high-quality infor-mation in the form of briefings and newscasts.
Google is introducing Augmented Reality directions in maps. Simply point your phone at the street and a StreetView AR overlay will point you in the right direction by keeping the original maps layout at the bottom of the screen.
Other notable announcements are:
Google assistant is getting six new voices including musician John Legend’s voice.
Gmail can now autocomplete an entire message with a feature called Smart Compose.
Google photos can spot your friends in your photos and offer to share those photos with the press of a button.
You don’t need to say “OK Google” every time you want to talk to Google assistant, just keep talking to it to get the conversation going.
Next version of Android, AndroidP has a ‘shush’ mode. If the feature is on and if you put your phone face down on a surface, it will automatically activate “do not disturb” mode.
Hari Gottipati is a tech evangelist based out of the Valley. Opinions expressed here are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer. His quotes can often be found in various technology magazines, GigaOM, CNN Money, WSJ, Bloomberg Business Week, etc. Follow him on Twit-ter/Facebook/Linkedin@harigottipati.