PARTYEMOJI
Casey: he said "we're on the verge of" ...something big.
All right gang — let's get out there and make some content.
We will have MUCH more from I/O, so please stay tuned.
Wow. Well that was fun. Long, but fun.
Sundar said "the verge"!
That's it!
"It's been a busy morning." Sounds like we're wrapping up.
Rolling out in the US "in the coming weeks" and more countries in the future.
Machine learning clusters titles automatically in cases when they're vague.
If you search for a job, you get a new UI with filters and you can turn on alerts.
Linkedin, Monster, Facebook, GlassDoor, and more all work with it.
New feature in Google Search. Will suggest jobs at all skill levels.
FedEx, Johnson & Johnson, others user Google's cloud job stuff to help suggest jobs to people.
"Use our products to help people find work."
Google for Jobs.
"We want to better connect employers and job-seekers."
Machine Learning can "have an immediate impact on people's lives" economically.
"I'm by no means a wizard of machine learning. I'm in high school. I YouTubed."
He used machine learning to improve early detection for breast cancer.
Video: Highlighting a 17-year-old Chicago developer who uses TensorFlow.
TensorFlow research cloud — giving away resources to universities.
Here's Sundar to talk TensorFlow.
Sundar Pichai coming back on stage after a video about open sourcing machine learning.
"These are just the first steps."
"We'll be rolling this out later in the year."
This is cool. They're putting virtual tornadoes and volcanoes into the classroom.
Google Expeditions, the education VR thing Google does, is adding an AR mode.
(Bavor has said "Imagine" a couple times, which is a codeword for "haven't made all this yet.")
The phone figures out where it is in space by looking at the shelves, then it can give you a little walking path the thing you want.
I would legit use VPS just to find things in my own refrigerator.
So you can go into a store, like Lowe's, and get directions in the big store to find the thing you want.
Visual Positioning Service.
Tango is going to work with Google Maps so it can work indoors. "We call this VPS."
Asus Zenfone AR (Tango phone) coming out this summer. "You'll notice a trend, the devices are getting smaller."
The Google I/O presentation will end later this year.
AR time. Obligatory Pokémon Go mention.
LATER THIS YEAR.
"Later this year" is when they "start to come to market."
Lenovo is also making one.
HTC is making one.
Qualcomm has made a reference design for a Daydream headset.
It uses sensors on the device. Sounds like Project Tango!
"We've dramatically improved tracking" with "worldsense."
I understand that it's a bridging technology, but I find the smartphone take on VR to be continually disappointing.
"The whole device is designed just for VR."
"Working with partners to make them."
New kind of VR device: standalone VR headsets.
"With a software update"
Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus adding Daydream this summer.
But we're starting with a recap of what happened over the past year.
Interesting to see AR get top billing here.
Android Go sounds a little like Windows RT.
"We see VR and AR in the same way."
Clay Bavor's here for VR now.
All devices with 1gb or less will get a "Go configuration" and later "every" Android device will have it as an option.
Optimized apps will be featured in the Play Store.
Google I/O: Moms Being Disappointed 2k17
You can type how it sounds and it'll transliterate to script. Also has real-time Google Translate.
Demo time! "I haven't learned Hindi yet. Sorry, mom."
Google apps will also be better for people who are multilingual. Gboard supports languages and has a transliteration feature.
"Data is like currency" is a neat and accurate way to think of it.
Lets you save offline and you can share videos peer-to-peer without using mobile data.
YouTube Go for users with less data. (It's already out now.) It has a new preview experience so you can look at it before you look at it. Shows you how big the video is, too.
Data Saver saves 750tb of data every day.
The Chrome Data Saver will be turned on by default.
Carriers can provide data settings right in OS settings, let people top up their data.
This is meant for entry-level Android devices in new markets, obviously, but I would love to have an optimized version of Android I could use on old phones.
System UI and Kernel will use less memory, down to 512MB of memory. (Apparently that won't apply to non-Go phones.)
Designed for devices with 1GB of memory or less.
It is impossible to hear "Android Go" and not think of Pokémon.
Optimizing Android O for cheap devices. Optimizing apps for low bandwidth, memory. Version of Play Store for those markets.
Android Go.
Sneak peek for entry-level android devices.
"Software also has to be tuned" for limited data, multiple languages.
"Devices need to be more affordable."
"There are now more users of Android in India than there are in the US."
Sameer Samat on stage. Talking about India and Brazil.
But there's more! (chuckles)
Android.com/beta
Beta release of O available today.
Upgraded emoji.
"There are tons more features in Android O that we don't have time to get into today."
Jet Brains integration, too.
"Mature and production ready from day one."
Biggest cheer of the day!
"It makes developers so much more productive."
Extreme cheering.
New programming language for Android. Kotlin.
(For developers.)
"There is One More Thing."
Casey.
We're 90 minutes into the presentation and Google hasn't launched a single new standalone messaging app.
Tells developers how many users are affected by their bad apps.
Play Console Dashboards tell developers why their apps cause battery drain, crashes.
Too many apps drain battery in background, so O has "wise limits" on background usage.
To echo Vlad's sentiment, if Google O is pretty boring but fixes all the little issues I have with my Pixel, I'll be happy.
Hopefully Google Play Protect can tell you which Russian botnet your phone is a part of.
"Extensive changes to runtime" like concurrent something something garbage collection something.
Boot time in O is faster. Twice as fast on a Pixel.
It's designed to make security on Android more visible. Tells you your apps are scanned.
Google Play Protect
We're starting with security. Machine Learning flags apps in Google Play. Google scans 50 billion apps every day — every installed app on every connected device.
Battery life, security, start up time, stability.
Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson is onstage to talk Vitals.
Will be available "later" this year.
And it's hardware accelerated on Android phones.
TensorFlow Lite. This is Google's Machine Learning stuff, but smaller for phones.
And of course the pop-up lets you call or open maps or whatever. "Without any data leaving the device." It's "On-device machine learning."
So if you double tap an address, the selector handles go automatically around the whole address.
I am also very excited about Android text selection.
When you select text, a neural network understands what it is and it tries to automatically select the right thing.
"Smart text selection" for copy and paste.
"Once the user opts in," it will work for "most" applications.
It suggests username in apps, e.g., to log into Twitter.
You can use Autofill in apps, not just in Chrome.
That was a lot of information about dots, tbh.
"Autofill with Google."
The color of the dot is extracted from the color of the icon.
This is basically what Apple has always done on the iPhone. But here you can long-press the app icon and see the notification right there.
They're dots on the launcher icons.
I'm not joking when I say that notifications are one of the things I'm most excited about with Android O.
"Notification Dots."
Maps, Netflix, and "a lot more" will support PIP.
When you hit the home button when a YouTube window is playing, it goes picture-in-picture. You can then swipe it away.
Picture-in-Picture. (That was noted in the earlier preview.)
Live demos happening wirelessly today. "What could possibly go wrong?"
"Keep vital system behavior in a healthy state."
Second is "Vitals."
"Fluid Experiences" is the first thing we'll talk about.
"You can expect a release later this summer."
"The real reason I'm here is to talk about Android O."
Laptops also have Android on Chrome OS (but this isn't a full launch yet, I think). We're jamming fast through updates right now.
Full launch for Android Things (IoT) also later this year.
New launcher interface coming to Android TV and the Google Assistant, too. Later this year.
1 million Android TV device activations every two months. (That's more than I could have guessed.)
10x user growth in Android Auto. Volvo and Audi going Android.
24 watch brands making Wear.
Going to talk about other devices. Starting with Android Wear 2.0.
He's pretty happy about 2 billion active devices.
(He'll be onstage after this video.)
Google is running a weird balance of introducing things that sound fun but also are maybe 1 degree away from a bad dystopian film.
Dave Burke is coming on stage. ANDROID TIME.
"The future of media is a future of openness and diversity." (And getting assaulted with water balloons.)
Google is going to pay 100x more of whatever they make off Super Chat for charity.
(This did make me laugh and I enjoyed it.)
Wojcicki is back onstage.
"This obviously just scratches the surface of what is possible," she says, as the YouTubers dodge paint balloons.
Every live stream offers us a new reminder of why most people neither create nor view live streams.
People are throwing water balloons at them. THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR YOUTUBE COMMENTS.
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They're going to get soaked for charity.
We're running a charity fundraising drive on Super Chat right now.
(How carefully do you think the live chat is getting moderated right now? I bet very carefully!)
I'm pretty sure I did this to Martin Shkreli in Watch Dogs 2.
Is it just me or do you recoil whenever Barbara says the words "Super Chat" out loud?
Isn't this what the live webcam business was all about?
A YouTube commenter can turn your lights off or fly your drone if you let them.
This is like the tagline for a horror movie.
"When a fan sends a superchat to a creator, things can happen in real life."
There's a new API for Super Chat, so chats can trigger actions in the real world.
Please please please let Super Chat be introduced as a standalone messaging app.
They're getting Super Chatted from the stage. It's big and blue and pinned.
You pay to chat?! Ughghgh.
"The Slo Mo Guys" is what I call the people responsible for updating the Google Voice app.
The Slo Mo guys are here, behind us.
April the no-longer-pregnant giraffe has raised "tens of thousands of dollars" for the Animal Adventure Home through Super Chat.
Super Chat came earlier this year. Fans pay money for more prominent comments.
On a phone you've got a small screen and pretty seamless motion tracking, but I'm not sure how well that translates to TV.
I'll have what Barbara Macdonald is having.
4X growth in YouTube livestreams in the past year. "This growth is AWESOME."
I can sort of imagine preferring a pannable 360-degree view of a concert instead of just a real flatscreen camera shot, but image quality in 360 cameras is... not all that, either.
SHE IS VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.
Barbara Macdonald is going to talk about "Super Chat."
"What if you could watch a 360-degree video... like a non-360-degree video?"
Live 360 videos, too.
You use a TV remote to pan. I guess you hit the 5-way D-pad?
(It is the remote.)
How do you pan a 360 video on a TV?
(Get ready to pick up your TV and swing it around?!)
YouTube 360 videos will work on TVs now in YouTube apps.
YouTube app on half a billion non-phone devices.
Suspiciously missing from the YouTube presentation this year: PewDiePie. What ever happened to that guy?
Sarah Ali take the stage to talk about TV features.
Watch time on TV is growing at 90 percent a year.
But the watch time in living rooms is growing much faster.
60 percent of YouTube is watched on mobile devices.
(Casey how do you feel about your snide YouTube comment jokes NOW? I feel bad, just a little.)
Story time: a carpenter saw a video about somebody who lost two fingers, so he built a prosthesis. That turned into a 3D-printed hand. Grew to a community of 6,000 people who have designed prosthetics for children in 50 countries.
Susan Wojcicki just described YouTube comments as if they were a good thing.
Comments and live streams "enable viewers to come together."
(JK love you YouTube commenters please don't flame me.)
A lot of inspiring about openness. "Openness leads to important conversations" (except for the conversations that happen in YouTube comments. Those: less important).
On YouTube you can be a vlogger, a gamer, or a citizen journalist. Or a Nazi! The choice is yours.
Something is happening later today about reaching the next billion users. Huh? Huh!
Doesn't that seem low? Who DOESN'T watch a YouTube video in a month?
A billion people a month watch video on YouTube.
"My first ever I/O on behalf of YouTube."
Susan Wojcicki takes the stage.
Real YouTuber montage happening here.
YouTube is up next. After a video.
Using Lens to discover information about photos of paintings you took at a museum is WILD — and something that's nearly impossible to imagine Amazon, Facebook, or Apple ever matching.
Rolling out "later this year."
There's a Google Lens button in the Google Photos app. It does Google Lens things: identifying paintings, doing OCR to tap phone numbers and make calls.
(So basically, everything Samsung announced with Bixby is happening with Google Lens. Womp Womp Samsung)
That's it for photos, but we need a recap about how photos are different now. We take too many, take pictures of receipts, etc. So... sounds like Google Lens is coming to Photos.
They're giving away free hardcover photo books to I/O attendees.
Google I/O 2017 is the Emotional Labor Automation Show. Which is not a bad thing.
Available today in the US on the web. Android and iOS next week.
I do plan to make a photo book out of unsolicited photos I have been sent on Grindr.
It also "premakes" books. Like it guesses if you want a book and suggests you go buy one.
I want a little book that is also a phone case. You can open the back and flip through it.
But each page after 20 costs more money, so it's easy to spend $50 on one. I did!
It automatically tries to guess the best photos from an album and lays them out for you.
$9.99 for softcover, $19.99 for hardcover.
Uh oh first demo fail. The search didn't bring back the photos it was supposed to.
The most important thing to know about photo books is that they are basically pure profit for Google, and so Google is going to be marketing them aggressively.
Photo Books. Like real physical books you can make and buy with your photos.
"In the coming weeks" is the new "In the coming months."
Coming to Android, web, and iPhone "in the coming weeks."
There's some kind of filter where you see some shared photos in the main view but you can dig in to see the rest of the photos. A little confusing.
Casey.
Adi the sad truth is that most parents would prefer cardboard children.
Again, seriously, I'm not sure Google thought through the optics of talking about automation by literally creating a cardboard cutout of your children and substituting it for the real thing.
Okay there are cardboard children onstage now. There is a selfie happening.
Okay I lied, I'm going to start a shared library that just shares all photos of cats.
The tech here is cool, though. Automatically sharing photos of certain people.
I would use this if Google's image recognition can distinguish between specific cats.
(This will end in disaster for somebody.)
This won't end in disaster at all!
This stuff looks creepy on the surface, but the sharing controls really are thoughtful. I suspect that most people will never used shared libraries, but if you have a spouse you aren't cheating on and some kids you love, it's genuinely useful.
You can share all, or share from a certain date, or share photos that include certain things like your kids.
Shared libraries. You can share your photo library with somebody special. "You have complete control over which photos you share."
"Wouldn't it be great if Google Photos automatically shared photos with that person?" Uhhhhhhh
"Wouldn't it be great if Google Photos automatically shared" photos of them?
In all seriousness, it's very weird for Google to position sharing photographs as a moral duty.
When people get photos, they can add more to the album.
You can review the photos, change the recipients, and then send the photos. They'll get an SMS or email if they don't have the app installed.
I wrote a LOT about the new Google Photos features — check it out!
Okay I'm gonna be the jerk here and say that this scene happened almost exactly in The Circle's "privacy is theft" scene.
Demo time: a notification reminder comes in. It goes to a new Sharing tab in the app.
On the list of reasons I'm a terrible person, forgetting to share photos doesn't even make the top hundred.
Today at Google: CALL YOUR MOTHER. SEND THAT PHOTO. Google thinks you are very inconsiderate.
"Suggested Sharing."
Google will suggest you send photos to the people it recognizes in your photos.
The problem turns out to be nagging you to send your friends and family pictures of them.
Video time: "You're kind of a terrible person." ...because you always forget to send photos.
"We think there's still a big and different problem that needs to be addressed" beyond current sharing options.
(Does all this seem like it's moving fast? It seems like it's moving fast. Maybe I'm old and need to be enhanced by AI myself)
Three new features today.
Half a billion monthly active users. 1.2 billion photos and videos per day.
We're getting an overview of how AI works in Google Photos already.
Next up: Google Photos.
(Also "Over time.")
"Over time we're going to bring all those developer actions right to the TV screen." <— the stuff that's coming to phones.
Modern Family clip now. Hooray product placement!
Way better when more than one person is trying to figure out what to watch together. Also works with YouTube TV's Cloud DVR.
You can ask "What's on YouTube" and finally (FINALLY) get a bare bones TV UI for Chromecast. Works with Netflix too.
All this stuff works because they added multi-user support to Home. Google trusts it knows you and can show you stuff from your accounts more than Alexa.
Basically Google is turning your house into a giant phone.
EG you can send your calendar to your TV.
You can also send these responses to your TV via Chromecast.
Note the "Soon." A lot of "soon" and "coming months" today.
When you ask Home, it sends directions to your phone. "Soon you can say 'OK Google, let's go.'"
Rishi's kids are still into Pokémon Go, according to Google Home.
"To do that, you need a screen." Uh, yeah.
Google Home can do "visual responses."
HBO Now, Hulu, many others coming, too. So you can ask for that stuff to play on Chromecast.
And "finally" Bluetooth support for any device.
SoundCloud and Deezer, too.
Spotify's free tier is coming to Home.
Coming "in the next few months."
Calls out with a private number, but you can link your number to the Google Assistant.
It recognizes your voice so it can use your own address book.
Will Google automatically detect that she wants him to visit and bring flowers and arrange that, though?
The actor playing Rishi Chandra's mom just now? You guessed it: Morgan Freeman.
"No setup, apps, or even phone required."
I doubt we're really calling Rishi's mom but she is mad at him for not calling. "Oh hi, everyone." Or maybe it's real. Who knows!
No love for Europe with the free calls, eh Google?
"Hey Google, call Mom."
Sounds like you can dial out from the Home. You can call any number in US or Canada for free.
Hands-free calling.
Will start with reminders, flight status, traffic alerts.
"Proactive assistance" sounds like a good idea on a whiteboard, but the next thing you know you're asking people if they want to buy movie tickets when they ask you for the weather and then they throw their smart speaker in the garbage.
The lights on the Home turn on, he says "Hey Google, what's up?"
Sounds like notifications for Home.
"Automatically notify you of those timely messages."
"Proactive Assistance" is coming to Google Home...
You can schedule meetings or set reminders. FINALLY!!
You can see why Google and other companies WANT you to buy things with your voice, but it's almost always so much easier to tap with your fingers.
This summer, hitting Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan.
(Dieter is keeping his hands warm by typing furiously fast. This must be the coldest Google I/O ever. Sorry I brought the British weather with me, guys.)
It's been out for 6 months. 50 new features since then.
Moving on! Time to talk about Google Home. Rishi Chandra takes the stage.
There are 70+ partners today.
This is a version of the "buy food or something" chatbot that I would actually use.
Any smart home developer can make a Google Action now.
#googlelovescarbs
"I didn't have to install anything or create an account."
I'm disappointed she's not literally ordering Panera to the amphitheater.
You can scan your fingerprint to pay with Google.
She's ordering food from Panera.
This isn't a demo, turns out. It's a video.
A full system with payments, receipts, account creation, &c.
They also will support transactions.
"They can even pick up where they left off across devices."
Actions are coming to Android phones and iPhones.
(She didn't mention Alexa, of course.)
"Actions on the Google Platform" is the only action most of these devs will be getting all year, if you know what I mean.
This is "Actions" on the Google platform. Like Alexa's skills, but Google.
Demo time! Valerie Nygaard.
It works with Google stuff and third-party developers.
I'm going to start taking bets on the first toothbrush with Google Assistant, btw. Hit me up.
Huffman is pointing out that Assistant isn't the same thing as Search. Because it can "do" stuff.
Coming to more languages: French, German, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian. A bunch - I didn't catch them all.
Lots of new languages being added to Assistant today, too.
There will be a "Google Assistant Built In" badge on products.
Already moving on! An image of a coffee maker just appeared. Do you want that? Do I want that?
"All your favorite Google features on the iPhone."
I'm definitely looking forward to putting Assistant on my iPhone and trying out all the nifty Lens stuff.
That's a lot of phones for the Assistant.
Heeey.
Google Assistant now available on iPhone.
Assistant can basically do all the things now that Google promised us in that original Glass conceptual video.
It recognized a band name on a marquee, and gives options to buy tickets.
Lens can automatically deal with business cards and receipts, apparently.
It just translated Japanese Menu to English, and then he asked what the dish looks like.
Lens can do Google Translate.
"Available in the coming months."
This actually is useful, but it's great to have an "advance" that is just bringing back the normal way of interacting with your phone.
Google Lens definitely coming to Assistant. We've got a demo for the feature.
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F I N A L L Y
AHHH. You can type to the Assistant on the phone.
He's pointing out that Google Home can recognize voices.
70 percent of requests to Assistant come in natural language, not keywords.
Three themes: Conversational, Available, Ready.
"It's your own individual Google."
"You should be able to just express what you want throughout your day and the right thing should happen."
He's been doing Search and Assistant for a long time at Google
Scott Huffman takes the stage.
No Burger King, though.
Google Assistant DJing here with much more success than our I/O guy.
It starts with a bunch of people saying "OK Google," and every attendee just checked their phone.
Now we've got a sizzle reel for Google Assistant.
Video time.
Google Assistant is now available on over 100 million devices.
"The most important product we are using this is for Google Search and Google Assistant."
We spent really quite a lot of time with Autodraw. https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15263434/google-ai-autodraw-doodle-bot-drawing-image-recognition
Also fun things: Autodraw. https://www.autodraw.com/
"One day AI will invent new molecules that behave in predefined ways."
Neural nets are also helping with DNA sequencing. "More accurately than state-of-the-art methods."
"Providing tools for people to do what they do better." - Google's AI motto.
Mostly I'm just being quiet and listening right now because AI is cool and Google is extremely good at it.
First time somebody said "It's early days" onstage. We will try to keep count.
We're looking at how machine learning can help with detecting cancer.
They're also called "baby neural nets," because Google has clearly learned some things from Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
Pichai made an Inception joke. "We must go deeper." Because they're nesting neural nets inside neural nets. It got a chuckle.
"We want it to be possible for hundreds of thousands of developers to use machine learning." A neural net will generate other neural nets to improve AI.
The fact that Pichai is leading with all this deep AI stuff is a sign, in case that's not obvious. This is a new moat for Google — or at least they want it to be.
It will focus on three areas: research, tools, and "applied AI."
All of Google's AI stuff will be at Google.ai
These are going to be available on the Google Cloud Compute Engine.
180 trillion floating point operations per second. Which seems like a lot.
Last year TPUs were good for inference (figuring out what a thing is), but not optimized for training. The next-gen "Cloud TPU" is good for training, too.
Pichai is talking about Tensor Processing Units, which are better than CPUs or GPUs for Google's AI processing.
If your data center isn't AI-first, kiss your ass goodbye.
On to server stuff: "AI First data centers"
So you can take a picture of the sticker on a router and it will save the info on it for you, for instance.
The premise now isn't just that it can identify things, but that it can save and organize the things it detects.
You can point it at restaurants to see the info about that restaurant (it also uses GPS).
I hope that eventually you can point Google Lens at a guy and it will tell you whether to date him.
It can grab a username and password from a Wi-Fi router. It has OCR.
Launch Lens from Assistant, point it at a flower, and it can identify the flower.
Coming first to Google Assistant and Photos.
"Set of vision-based computing capabilities."
New initiative: "Google Lens"
Biggest cheers since the beginning of the keynote for that one.
Google removed a chain link fence from an image. Wild.
"Coming very soon" .... Google can remove obstructions from photos.
Claims that Google's computer vision is better at recognizing images than humans. Huh.
Google Home is now personalized to the user, so everyone hears a different Burger King ad.
"Similar to speech, we are seeing great improvements in computer vision."
"We are seeing great improvements in computer vision."
Google didn't need 8 microphones, it only needed 2, on the Google Home — because it uses machine learning to figure out who is speaking.
(Vision, eh? That's iiiinteresting.) But we're starting by talking about Voice.
Voice and vision are "new modalities" for computing, after keyboard and mouse.
He's charting an evolution from keyboard / mouse to multitouch to voice.
(Same thing that's in Inbox, btw)
Rolling out Smart Reply to 1 billion users of Gmail.
Pichai is showing a bunch of products that use Google AI and machine learning. Duo, YouTube suggestions, AdBrain, Photo Search.
"We are rethinking all our products" to incorporate machine learning and AI.
"Computing is evolving again ... from a mobile-first to an AI-first world."
"As you can see, the robot behind me is also pretty happy."
Android: 2 billion active devices.
Every day users upload 1.2 billion photos to Google.
(Dare you to bring up Allo. DOUBLE DARE)
800 million monthly active users on Google Drive. 500 million active users on Google Photos.
Doing various stats here — 800 million active users for Google Drive.
Google's mission is still "organizing the world's information," Pichai says. He's hitting the numbers now. 1 billion users on YouTube, 1 billion hours watched. 1 billion KM navigated on Maps daily.
"Every single day, users watch over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube."
Sundar is doing a victory lap about moving I/O from the supremely depressing Moscone Center to this ampitheater.
He's going over how big the event is. 7,000 attendees, 400 satellite events. He's also telling us to wear sunscreen.
"I love you guys too," he says after somebody yells out "We love you Sundar!"
"I love you guys, too."
CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage!
Oh the guy is I and the egg is O.
"What will your idea become?"
Google had better be releasing a twee puzzle platformer after the keynote.
The characters are clearly Larry and Sergei but I can't tell who's who.
It's very cute. They have climbed a mountain, dived into it, and run through an obstacle course.
"This is the story of an idea." This dude and his golden egg are making an app I guess.
Remaking an '00s antidepressant ad is a brave choice for a keynote intro.
And more video to start, a cute animation of a dude who has found an egg, that is following him.
Quick Tilt Brush shoutout at the 2.
It's a video countdown, as is tradition.
Okay here we go. With the roaring sound of ripping paper.
Got a sonic boom here. Things are kicking off.
There is cheering because it's time to start, and yet we have not yet started. Soon, we will start.
We've got an augmented reality overlay of bubbles over the Mountain View audience, because that is inescapable now.
Red's unfair advantage over blue is simply that it's better.
Red primes players for aggression too much. It would produce an unfair advantage.
Can we talk about the scandalous exclusion of red from this #gameofbubbles? What's up with that? If red was here, it'd be kicking blue's butt.
BUPDATE: Blue winning again. I don't understand you people. What is it with blue? It is clearly an inferior color to all other colors.
Based on the last weather report I checked it's supposed to be in the 80s tomorrow, so just come to the VR keynote with me.
Unfortunately I will no longer be able to used my planned joke, "It's hotter out here than a laptop running Chrome."
Good morning to all. I spent all day yesterday writing jokes about how hot it was going to be outside in Mountain View and then I showed up and it's total hoodie weather.
Any further developments in the #gameofbubbles will henceforth be called "Bupdates." I'm sorry / you're welcome.
The goal of this game is to take all the bubbles in a communal bubble pool and keep them to yourself.
I would try this bubbles game out for myself but my fingers are too stiff to adequately manipulate my phone.
Blue is winning again. Everything is the worst. People are terrible. Ban people.
The bubbles started as play but have since been gamified into a two-sided competition, in a fairly dark metaphor for the sharing economy.
The game is something to do with picking your favorite color and people are choosing Blue instead of Orange. Which is yet more evidence that people lack taste.
Google apparently has strong opinions about the inflated venture capital market here in Silicon Valley. #gameofbubbles
Google apparently has strong opinions about the inflated venture capital market here in Silicon Valley.
"A global game is starting soon." With the bubbles.
We can see all your bubbles on the screens here at I/O. There's something weirdly Circley about its cheerfulness.
All your bubbles are belong to Google.
Want to do... something... with bubbles? https://bubbles.withgoogle.com/
Selfies are happening.
The guy with the press sign is dancing! The DJ finally got somebody.
The DJ stands, ensconced in his tower of isolation, dropping beats. He surveys the crowd from his high vantage, and considers: What sorcery will make such nerds dance?
A single tear falls beneath his circular sunglasses.
They're using Roli Blocks to do it. Roli Blocks are cool.
There are DJs dropping weird ambient beats up in towers, "Audio powered by Android."
Android O had better include more fine-grained weather control options.
40 minutes to go and as Adi said it's a little chilly. Later, we will be complaining about it being too hot.
The outdoors, I tell ya. Google really is pushing developers to try new things.
Chairs are the future of headphones, Vlad.
I've no complaints about Google's pre-show jams. The bass is gently vibrating my chair, which is nice.
Well great, no lyrics in this song. The fatal flaw in my system is exposed.
Our wired Ethernet here is amazing, but mobile is starting to get bad enough that I'm identifying songs by typing lyrics fragments into search instead of Shazaming them. We just got through a Chromeo song.
My hands are stiff with cold and I am awaiting the sun's lambent embrace.
HELLO AND WELCOME, FRIENDS! We are seated in the fancy boxes with the fancy Ethernet cables and hopefully enough shade to keep our laptops from overheating. The festivities begin at 10AM PT. Until then, we'll be sitting here listening to smoooooooooooooth jazz. Then some funky beats. Google's got a whole vibe going here, is what I'm saying.
Lined up!
Today your friendly livebloggers will be myself, Casey Newton, Adi Robertson, and Vlad Savov on photos. We also have Vjeran Pavic and Tyler Pina here to shoot video for you all later. It's a whole big crew and we're excited to bring you news with jokes.
Also, check out this great piece on the rise of the Android-powered car by Kirsten Korosec.
Hey there! You're a bit early! We expect things to kick off at 10AM PT on Wednesday, May 17th. In the meantime, here's what we expect this year and here's one big rumor: the Google Assistant may show up on the iPhone.
Event Details
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