Tech News: Google I/O Highlights

the pandemic. This year, the company held a virtual event in which presenters appeared on camera in front of a small audience of Googlers at the Google Plex in Mountain View, California. So we're going to go over some of the announcements from that event. And first up is Android twelve. There were a lot of updates to Android's operating system that we're announced and it is now public beta, but it

will launch for real zs this fall. Some of the changes are to use your interface and they're largely cosmetic. For example, the color palette of the operating system is more customizable in Android twelve, and you can set the OS so that it will choose a color palette sourced from whatever image you choose as your background wallpaper. So

on my phone. I've got a picture of my doggie Tibolt as my wallpaper, and presumably if I run Android twelve on my phone, then my notifications and stuff will have a color scheme that reflects the colors in that photo, which is kind of neat. There are tons of other

updates besides the cosmetic, however. One is that there's a new privacy dashboard and Android twelve, which lets you see which apps are accessing your phone's various features and how frequently they do so, so you can check to see which apps are checking on the your location, you know, really frequently, or making use of your camera or your microphone or whatever. And you can also use the dashboard

to revoke access to those features should you wish. So if you look and say, oh, this app is pinging my location, you know, twenty times a day, you can revoke access from that dashboard. It's Google's way to give users more insight into how their phones are harvesting data with these various apps. And don't get me wrong, Google does this as much or more than anyone else, but

I do think this is a really nice feature. Other updates to the OS include a feature in which the clock on the screen saver screen will change size depending upon how many notifications you have, so as you clear out notifications, the clock gets bigger. That's a pretty handy way to see if you've got messages waiting on you on your phone. One of the cool technologies Google showed off at the event was projects star Line, which is

a sort of three D video conferencing technology. In the version we saw at the event, there were examples of two people each sitting down in front of a large screen, and there wasn't really any indication as to how far

apart these people were in real space. I mean, maybe they were across the country from each other, or maybe they were in different parts of the same building, but either way, the setup included depth sensing cameras that could capture light fields and then send that data over to the other screen while doing the same thing for the

other side. So the effect was that the image you saw on screen appeared to have real depth to it, almost as if the person you're talking to on screen is actually sitting right in front of you in person. Which is pretty nifty stuff all by itself. But what I found particularly fascinating is that Google developed a compression algorithm that can handle this kind of application in the

first place. High definition camera with depth sensing capabilities is going to generate a lot of data and transmitting that data in real time so that you can have a video chat with no perceptible lag time. That's a big challenge. Google says it developed a way to compress the data stream down to a factor of one hundred, so one hundred times smaller than the uncompressed size. The demonstration was cool.

It was also prerecorded, I should add, but there's no word on whether Google is going to roll this out on any sort of meaningful scale, or if this will remain more as a demonstration of really neat technologies that might find their way into other applications in the future. Something that is rolling out is another collaborative work tool called smart Canvas. Google's demo showed team members working on a project together in real time on a Google platform

that incorporates stuff like Google Docs and Google Sheets. Also allowed users to have a video chat going at the same time, so that people can talk with one another while collaborating in real time, and the tool incorporates some of Google's AI features as well to to help communicate clearly and avoid pitfalls. So the example they had in their video was using the word chairman in part of a presentation and the AI suggest changing it to chair person to avoid using a gender specific noun. So that

was one example they gave. Google isn't a stranger to creating collaborative tools. I still remember the old Google Wave product, which was interesting but somewhat confusing way back in the day, and that would allow multiple people to work in the same virtual workspace simultaneously. At the time, it was kind of hard to imagine use cases for Google Wave beyond how I was using it, which was to build out

a rundown for live shows. But smart Canvas has a more straightforward approach to collaboration that I think is pretty easy to understand. I wasn't super impressed with the interface when I saw it, but um, it was, you know, kind of stripped down. It wasn't like flashy or anything, so maybe simpler is better. I don't know. I'm also notoriously bad about using collaborative tools, so maybe I'm not the right one to comment on it. In addition, Google showed off an AI app called lamb DA that was odd.

So this AI uses things like voice recognition, and natural language processing to interpret language. Then it generates responses and makes it very conversational, and moreover, it can generate responses as if it were something else, as opposed to you know, the Google Assistant, which is just this kind of ephemeral AI assistant. In the demos that Google showed off, they had Lambda answering questions as if Lambda were a paper

airplane or the dwarf planet Pluto. And this makes me wonder if you had Lamb a pose as a chicken, would it finally explain why it crossed the road, Because

a lot of people have been asking about that. It really was interesting to think of an app that could presumably put itself in the role of different things and then answer questions about it, including bits in which the AI would make the equivalent of small talk only as if the AI were you know, the dwarf planet Pluto or whatever it was neat and it really shows how far we've come with natural language processing and the ability to create AI programs that can seemingly converse fairly well.

Though Google does say that this is far from perfect, it's still a pretty early build. It feels like another big step forward from the demo we saw a couple of years ago in which a Google assistant program made reservations on the behalf of a user, and it seemed to be an actual assistant, like it called up a restaurant to make reservations, and it was impossible to tell that it was an automated program. It sounded like it

was a person, which is pretty nifty. Google also had some announcements about where os that's w E A R. Now it's just known as where, and didn't really talk about the Pixel Watch. In fact, Google also didn't talk about pixel phones. Really. There was a distinct lack of talk about hardware at all. They didn't mention anything about

the rumored Google design chips that are codenamed Whitechapel. You know, like Apple, Google is apparently moving toward developing its own processors rather than relying on stuff that's made by other companies. None of that was brought up in the IO event, at least not as of the recording of this episode. Other stuff Google showed off included phone apps that are better at working with different skin tones for stuff like white balance that has traditionally been one of the big

problems with Google photo apps. They simply didn't work as well for people of color, which is one of the many ways tech can turn out to have a bias against certain groups. And Google demonstrated a cool technology that could create an animation from two different photos of the same scene. So let's say you take a picture of someone who's standing in a particular pose and they're standing in front of like a landmark of some sort, and then they make a different pose and you take a

second photo. With this new feature, Google could create interpretative frames between those two photos and create a short animation moving from one pose to the other. It's kind of creepy in a way because Google is literally creating new images based off the input of the two reference frames and then joining them together. So it's creepy and cool at the same time, kinda like most of my friends. And Google showed off updates two maps which will now

include more relevant information as you move through areas. For example, the new maps will show you restaurants that happened to be open as you pass through town, so you're not getting a notification about, you know, Billy Bob's Best b b Q when Billy Bob's happens to be closed. That wouldn't do you much good, and maps will alert you when areas are getting busy and help you plan routes better. Maybe it's best to stay at the office for another twenty minutes and that will end up saving you forty

five minutes of sitting in traffic, for example. And there are some cool a R features in Google Maps that they showed off, like virtual signs that can pop up in your view that tell you where certain landmarks are in relation to where you are. Oh and they will also help drivers pick the most eco friendly routes, routes that will have fewer stops and starts to them, or fewer locations where you know you might have to break suddenly or drive up a steep hill, which is kind

of a neat feature. So it may not be the fastest route to your destination, but it would be at least, in theory, a route that would generate fewer carbon emissions because of the nature of the drive, which sounds kind of chill to me. Oh and if you have a BM double you you might be able to unlock and start your car using your phone as a digital key. Android twelve will support digital key operations over u w

B and NFC protocols. But so far, BMW is the only automaker confirmed to offer compatible car models with this technology. It is another example of how smart devices are replacing various other things we typically use, from payments to car keys. But in non Google news, the cryptocurrency world has seen a dramatic drop in value over the last two weeks.

Since May twelve, the overall market, which includes cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and ethereum, as well as doge coin, the joke that really got out of hand, and numerous others, the market has dropped in value to the tune around eight hundred billion dollars as I record this. Many cryptocurrencies are experiencing a brief climate value as I record this episode, So it could be that we just saw ma of

drop and now the market is recovering. Or it could be that what I'm seeing is just a blip and we're going to have a bear market in which valuation will continue to drop further. No one is really sure, and the big part of that is that the value of many of these currencies largely depends on whether people

are buying into them or selling them off. Buying cryptocurrencies decreases the supply, at least for most cryptocurrencies, which in turn, you know, drives up the value of the remaining cryptocurrencies that are in circulation. Selling off cryptocurrencies to convert them into cash, that increases the supply and thus the value decreases. Now it's a bit more complicated than that, but those

are the basics. So does this mean you should rush in and buy up cryptocurrencies while they are still relatively low or at least, you know, lower than they were two weeks ago. I have no idea. We might see the market plunge again. Heck, this could be the big getting of a relatively long bear market where values dropped week after week before they recover. Or we might already be in another upswing. It's really hard to tell, and chances are anyone who is giving you hard and firm

advice has a vested interest in the outcome. So if someone you know is stressing that, hey, now is the time to buy, a good follow up question for that person is how much money do you have wrapped up in cryptocurrency? Because it could be that the person telling you to buy is desperate to see those values go up so that they can recapture some of the wealth they had been accumulating prior to the market downturn. Just

be careful, is all I'm saying. I mentioned in the Google Stories about how Google's photo app is getting tweaks to address negative biases and the app has with regard to people of color. Twitter is doing something similar. Twitter had been using a tool to auto crop photos, using I to identify the subject of a photograph and then to crop the image so that it would better fit

within Twitter feeds, particularly on mobile devices. But in use it was shown to work best with pictures of white people, and it would crop those images fairly effectively, but it worked much less well for people who weren't white. Not great, So now Twitter is abandoning the auto crop feature. The company tested the algorithm for gender and race biases and

concluded that in fact, the algorithm does have problems. Now Twitter's mobile app will show full images in the Twitter feed and will only crop photos if the pictures are just too tall or too wide to fit on screen, and then only doing that in a pretty standard way as opposed to trying to auto identify the subject of the photo. Once again we see how bias can work its way into code, even unintentionally, and I think Twitter

made the right move here. Perhaps in the future the company will have an improved auto cropping tool that won't show the same tendencies towards bias, But in the meantime, it's better to have nothing than to have a tool that works really well for one demographic and not so well for all the others. Finally, byte Dance, the parent company that owns TikTok, has announced a change in leadership that I find interesting and fairly refreshing. Co founder jeng Yi Ming says he will step down as CEO to

take on some other role in the company. So in a message to employees, he explained that he felt his strengths were in areas outside of managing people, including ideation and data analysis and that kind of thing. He also said he's not a very social person and that he felt that byte Dance needed a leader who would be

able to take the company to new places. So, in other words, he was saying, I might have been the right person to get things moving to where they are, but I'm not the right person to evolve the company from here. Co founder Liang Rubo will take over as ce oh, and I've seen this sort of thing happen with a few companies here in the States. There are some entrepreneurs who absolutely love the experience of launching a new company and then having it grow to a certain point,

but beyond that they tend to lose interest. Their strengths lie in those early phases of getting a company off the ground and establishing a presence. But once these companies reach a certain scale, the entrepreneurs find it less interesting or outside of their wheelhouse of skills, and so they look for ways to move into other roles. And I

think that's a healthy thing. Not everyone is made to grow into these leadership positions while the company itself is also scaling up, and a transparent transition of leadership tends to be a sign of a healthy company as opposed to some of the revolving door situations we've seen with companies in the past. Analysts don't expect this change in leadership to have massive consequences for daily operations of either Byte Dance or TikTok. And that's it. That's the tech

news for Thursday, May one. I hope all of you are well. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in tech stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.