Google Gems
blog.googlePeople keep saying that Apple is doomed because AI is taking over and Apple has historically been incompetent in this area. After just watching Google IO and seeing the new AI features exclusive to Android, nothing that was shown tells that a single Apple user is jumping ship.
It still feels like very early days, Apple has plenty of time.
Also a key difference: Google, OpenAI etc. place a lot of value in selling these AI services to third parties. So they have to hype up their offering, constantly talking about what's coming around the corner, etc. etc.
By comparison I think Apple will be very content to have an entirely closed AI ecosystem that you automatically get when buying one of their devices. They don't have to sell it in the same way.
It was long and boring presentation, so maybe I missed something this time but over the years Google keeps promising amazing stuff on Android and yet I'm to see someone doing something on Android that my iPhone can't(maybe they have the extra features, it's just that no one seems to be using those).
Oh and this stuff was amazing years ago, now it's boring. They apparently did some RAG applications that is usually a niche, specialised applications that small companies will do as SaaS. I doubt that any of this will see wide adoption, therefore I expect everything to be dropped and added to the list of "Killed by Google".
IMHO, Google needs to focus. Stop throwing things to the wall and see what sticks, instead do something substential and stick with it.
For a while, having a good keyboard, full web browser, and real multitasking were things that Android did and iOS didn't really. Seems those are at roughly parity now.
One nice thing that Android does now and I don't think iOS does is let you swipe up from the bottom to select text or images being displayed on the screen. It's useful for copy/pasting (even when the text is baked into an image) and for translating foreign text. It seems to use OCR, so sometimes you'll get weird errors like a 1 where an l should be, but it's overall useful.
> It's useful for copy/pasting (even when the text is baked into an image) and for translating foreign text
I do this by taking a screenshot. The OCR stuff works very well on Apple platforms, it even works on videos.
Over the years, there always was something that "Android would do but iOS can't", like supporting Flash Player or Copy/Paste or downloading things on the browser. These were never an issue because unless you were trying to use the phone as a PC. As the web transformed and the tech got advanced enough to make phone primary computer for many people, these issues were fixed.
These days Android/iOS have a parity, I'm glad that Android exist and there are people doing interesting things with it.
That's a great feature for identifying the source of an image, too. Particularly, if someone on Twitter is subtweeting someone with a screenshot, you can get to the original tweet in three taps. I also used it the other day to select and copy all the text from a PDF where text selection had been disabled. Voice recognition and dictation also seems to be years ahead of what you get on iOS, at least with my voice and English.
Siri is a piece of hot garbage. I am strongly considering switching (back) to Android. iOS is certainly nicer, but having a voice assistant that actually works, and actually has access to my gmail + gcal + gdocs could be huge.
Execution is to be seen though...
Um, won't Google pay Apple to have Google AI on Apple devices, rinse repeat, until Apple catch up or just rake it like they with Search.
These announcements are kind of underwhelming but google is definitely going full force against openai now. Who knows how the playing field will look in another 2 years if they keep using their full weight like this
Competition is good, and the end user profits!
In this case the profiting end user is Jensen Huang...
Neat!
Supported countries: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/14517446?hl=en&co=G...
Nice! They should have titled this "Gemini 1.5 Pro now globally GA".
If anyone from Google is reading, the link on the word Gemini Advanced on "Today we’re bringing Gemini 1.5 Pro, our cutting-edge model, to Gemini Advanced." leads to 404
One day soon Google will need the trust of developers and it will have to contend with the long erosion of developer trust from cancelled products and projects.
As usual with the google AI announcements, it’s a lot of “soon you’ll be able to do X” for the more interesting features. It shows that they’re rushing: they want to scream that they’re still relevant in the space, and are talking about features they don’t have now.
I can also do that: I can think about something possible and say soon you’ll be able to do it. It’s not impressive…
They literally are announcing Gemini 1.5 Pro GA here. Yes, the one with 1 million token context.
All of this will be pointless if they can't fix the UI of Google. Gemini, gems etc it's not even started yet and I'm already confused about what they're offering and how I'd use it.
Do I get any of this with my Google one account or do I need a business account or a Google one plus ai?