Google I/O: AI, ML, Home, Android O, Poor Allo

Last year, Google introduced Google Home and I wrote about what I thought it last year.  I said Google's advantage will be adding personalization to individual voices. As I expected, Google has now added personalized experiences based on users' voices. This will create a more useful experience for its users; something that Amazon and other competitor can't compete in just yet.

Google Home is slowly opening to third-party developers and it's going to quickly catch up to Amazon Alexa's capability. Google Home worked with only a limited number applications, but now it's quickly expanding (e.g. Spotify).

Another newly added advantage with Google Home is being able to call anyone from it (unlike Amazon Echo where you can only call other people with Alexa devices). With the voice personalization, "Call mom" will call the respective mom.

Google Photos continues to grow as a service. Suggested Sharing in Google Photos is going to be amazing. Now you can share photos of your friends with them without too much effort! Though, notifications from the app to share photos constantly may get annoying (particularly at launch with so many previous photos). Shared libraries will allow you to share your entire photo library (or photos of certain people) with anyone you want (presumably, best friends and SOs).

For iPhone users, Google Assistant is now available for your devices! It probably won't have the same integration or accessibility as on Android but it'll do the trick (where Siri can't). This will make Google Home more useful for iPhone users too.

So Android O. What's new?

Android took a half-step closer to iOS in terms of displaying "Notification Dots" on app icons which have unread notifications; I say half step because it doesn't display numbers like iOS. Android O will have picture-in-picture (think doing something with a video hovering), more efficient selecting text (through context), and have the feature to insert saved account information from Chrome into specific apps.  Otherwise, Android O is faster and increases battery life (as usual).

The overall theme of this year's I/O: AI and ML. Making the technology available to other people and solving problems that may benefit from the technology.

Unfortunately, Google didn't mention its (messy) messaging platforms. So we continue living with mostly Hangouts with Allo on the side. Can I say that Duo is on the bench?