Gadgetory

what's happening Brian Tong here and welcome to Google issues for all the Google you can think of this week it's all the reactions from the Google i/o keynote so let's just dive in and the star of the show without a doubt was the Google assistant Google leads the industry with their AI voice assistant and they made that gap even bigger with the demo of how they're combining their Google lends tech with the assistant to take things to the next level I just tap the Google lens icon point the camera and my assistant can instantly translate them into English and now I continue the conversation now google lens is a set of vision based computing capabilities that can do things like specifically identifying a flower or if you're walking in the street because your phone knows where you are with GPS it can help identify the businesses around you with information cards or even take that Wi-Fi router label with its name and password and instantly connect you to the network is your mind blown yet now the Google assistant gets smarter and can now work with third-party applications to do things like order lunch from a Panera and respond to specific changes you want to make they still didn't show us the promise of how conversational it's supposed to be in action so we'll wait for that but the brains of Google's assistant is ridiculous and getting a whole lot smarter as we speak and if you want to try it out on your iPhone because I've heard a lot of people have this thing called the iPhone Google released the Google assistant for iOS and you can get it today now it's not the full assistant since it's not directly connected to the iOS ecosystem but you'll see how much better it is all right the assistant is the heart of the Google home and that receives some new improvements like hands-free calling to use it as a speakerphone like the echo does it also added the ad-supported Spotify if you aren't a subscriber and you can use the home as a Bluetooth speaker if you want to send audio from another device to it but the Google assistant gets bumped up another level if you're watching content with the connected chromecast it now sends visual responses to your TV when you ask for help from the Google home so it could be your calendar the weather or YouTube videos to pick from and all this will be personalized depending on who uses it because it can support and distinguish between six different use no one has anything remotely close to this right now and Google showed that they are the smartest company in tech when it comes to artificial intelligence for the consumer all right a new standalone VR headset from Google was also announced kind of in concept Google's standalone VR headset has no cables no phone no PC everything is inside the headset and it uses inside out positional tracking to detect where you are in the world without the need for any external camera set up in a room now Google has built a prototype reference model with Qualcomm's help and the coming months Lenovo and HTC vive will release commercial versions of the VR headset with no names still yet to be announced now that was some of the big news that were still also no official name given to Android Oh which will officially roll out this summer with picture picture instead of badges they like to call these things notification dots and better battery management but the biggest cheers from the entire keynote came from the announcement that the added Kotlin as the new official programming language for Android see that's why it's a Developers Conference but I don't know why they were getting like horny with the features since one of the themes of Android Oh was to provide a fluid experiences and it makes you wonder if it's going to be called Android Oh face like oh all right the goups can really do anything they want but if you could tell they didn't have any big announcements to make beyond the assistant and the home they brought YouTube to stage for the first time to tell us about 360 video on your TV from the YouTube app something normally reserved for a blog post and they didn't show us anything striking that made me say I got to do this like I love 360 video but on a TV screen objects that are small because of the 360 perspective become even smaller so I wasn't feeling that now Google photos also get some time to shine at Google i/o but it's never a good thing when they spend way more time on photos than they did individually for the assistant or home it gets suggested sharing based on who's in the photos shared libraries which lets people you select see photos taken in real time but let's hope it's image recognition is really good and leaves out all the and a cool idea that will save you a whole bunch of time with Google's photo book see you just select a whole bunch of photos even multiple shots it doesn't matter then Google takes the best ones edits them and orders them and voila you have a photo book right now it kind of like sounds nice at first but to me this is for lazy people or people who are too busy to even care to put in time to make a photo book with this thing called a love like l.o.v.e love but if it lands you the person of your dreams for 9.99 maybe it's worth it's you and i know a lot of you just nodded your heads alright that's going to do it for this week you can email me at Google lynches at cnet.com or tweet me at Brian Tong tell us what you thought about Google i/o and we'll put some of your thoughts in next week's show thanks much for watching we'll catch you all next time for some more of that Google issues Gilda licious