HomePod

As expected, Apple announced its HomePod speaker to compete with Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. But additionally, it wants to take on Sonos, to become the top home entertainment speakers. Available in 2 colours – black and white – and integrated with Siri, it will control your home devices, check the weather and update you with news. Furthermore, by using spacial awareness, 6 in-build speakers and powerful subwoofers, it will optimise sound effects to bring you an unmatched, immersive musical experience. Priced at $349, we expect it to be out this December for customers in US, UK and Australia, and worldwide sometime next year.

MacBook, iMac and iMac Pro

Apple announcements for the Macbook Pro were mostly hardware related. For starters, the Macbook will harbour a new beast inside: Intel’s Kaby Lake processors. The MacBook now will go upto 1.3 GHz, while the 13 inch MacBook Pro will hit 3.5 GHz and the 15 inch 3.1 GHz. Additionally, the Macbook Air is also getting a boost.

Apple also updated its iMac with Intel’s new powerful Kaby Lake processors, brighter Retina display with 4K resolution, 3 times more powerful graphics and USB ports with Thunderbolt 3. They will also support graphics for VR content creation! Most importantly, it’s available for orders today, and will be in stores on Wednesday, priced starting from $ 1,099 for the 21.5 inch model.

Lastly, the tech giant introduced its new iMac Pro, focusing on improving processing speeds, enhancing display and upgrading graphics. It’s scheduled to ship in December, with 27-inch 5K Retina display with improved cooling, 8-core Xeon processors (upgradable to 18-core), up to 4TB of SSD and 128GB of ECC memory, 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports  and 22 Teraflops of graphics computation power. The iMac Pro starts at $ 4, 999.

iOS 11

iOS 11 for iPhones will have several upgrades primarily for Siri. It will now have the “Do Not Disturb” mode for driving, improved speech ability with Deep Learning and the on-device learning to suggest actions. Furthermore, it will now be able to translate in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Apart from Siri, iOS 11 will see a redesign of the control center, an updated Music app with new features and more. The camera will have better performance in low lighting, while Live Photos will offer new editing tools and features. Lastly, you will now be able to send and receive money through iMessages.

iPad

On the iPad, iOS 11 will ease multitasking. Now you will be able to drag and drop folders, files and photos like you do in MacBook. But one of the coolest upgrades announced was: you can now search for handwritten text! So when you make notes with the Notes app using an Apple Pencil, the software will use deep learning algorithm to find the keyword you are searching for. iPad’s filesystem will have an improvement, making it easier to access files and folders. Lastly, the iPad Pro will be available in 3 sizes, with a new 10.5 inch released priced at $649.

WatchOS

Seeing the success of Mickey Mouse on the watchface, Apple’s smartwatch will now have new characters, notably Woody from Toy Story! As health awareness is rising rapidly, WatchOS will include monthly fitness challenges by tracking and monitoring wearer’s activity. Partnering with the leading gym equipments, WatchOS will give more accurate updates on calorie loss and activity information. Moreover, you can now find and play music through the new integrated Music App to pump you up in your workouts and daily activities.

ARKit

This was the coolest demo of the keynote. ARKit will now enable developers to easily develop advanced augmented reality applications such as Pokemon Go. On stage, Apple provided a live demo, by adding a lamp and a coffee cup on the scene and showing several functionalities. With an impressive quality of image, this demo was an instant hit.

Apart from these six, Apple announced the new macOS, called High Sierra, which comes with updates for Safari to block autoplaying videos and site trackers. Additionally, there were other updates on the hardware. AppleTV had just a tiny mention: Amazon Prime videos will now be available on it. Overall, the WWDC17’s keynote made it clear that Apple is working hard to stay on top of the tech industry.

Therefore, to help you out, here are the 10 biggest announcements at Google I/O.

Android O

Google announced that there were now over 2 billion Android users! And accompanied with this news, they launched the beta version of their new OS, Android O. It comes with several new luring features such as: Picture in Picture, Notification Dots, Autofill, and many more. So, if you are an app developer, get started now by migrating your apps to Android O.

Android Go

You’d think with 2 billion users Google would be satisfied –  well, no. It is now targeting the next billion, that is, users who survive with low-cost phones. Smartphones with less than 1GB of RAM accounted for more than one-fourth of the total shipment in India during Q1 2017. And for that, Google is releasing Android Go next year, an OS which can run on less than 1GB of memory! If you want reach out to a bigger market to gain an edge over your competitors, it’s time to start developing “Lite” apps.

Google Assistant

Google is rapidly going from “Mobile first to AI first”, and therefore, invested a lot of time presenting the updates for Google Home and Google Assistant. First and foremost, Assistant is expanding to iOS  and will be available to iPhones and iPads.

Starting today, we’re bringing the #GoogleAssistant to iPhones. Whether at home or on the go, your Assistant is here to help. #io17 pic.twitter.com/a6T20HwnU9

— Google (@Google) May 17, 2017

Furthermore, now you can also type, instead of just talking to your assistant –  which honestly is a huge relief! The third major upgrade is the integration of Google Lens, which we’ll discuss in just a moment.

Google Home

Google Home, at long last, can now place calls in US and Canada for free! Connect your Google speakers with Home, and you can experience hands-free calling. This major update makes it a close competitor to Amazon’s Echo. The device can now be connected by Bluetooth to listen to music and songs. It can also give visual response if connected to an iPhone, Chromecast or Android device. Lastly, Home can now give revised updates on your schedule, for example, ask you to leave early for a meeting if there is more traffic. It was evident at I/O that Google is putting in great effort to make Home as essential as a smartphone.

Google Lens

The future tech giants will be those who can conquer AI today. At Google I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new technology called Google Lens. It will be integrated with Assistant, and will not only see, but also understand. Using powerful Machine Vision algorithms, it will help you identify objects and scenes around you. For the demo, Google pointed the camera at a flower, and Lens immediately identified which flower it was! Pichai also showed how convenient it can now be to connect to your home’s wifi – all you have to do is take a picture of your wifi sticker and the phone will connect! As a third example, you can point your phone’s camera at a restaurant, and Lens will give you the information of its name, rating and other information. With the integration with Assistant, you can now take a pic of your concert ticket and ask Assistant to set a reminder based on it! Lastly, you can also get live translation. As a demo, Scott Huffman pointed his phone to a Japanese sign and asked “What does it say?”, and got the immediate translation!

Google Photos

“More than 500 million people use Google Photos every month, backing up more than 1.2 billion photos and videos per day” Google tweeted. Therefore now, Google Photos will enable Suggested Sharing. When you take a photo of your friend, Google will automatically suggest that you share it with him or her. It also introduce Sharing Libraries, which will let families share picture libraries with other members. Lastly, Google Photos will automatically enhance and clean your photos.

Kotlin

Java is currently the most popular programming language for Android app developers. But Google wants to change that with the introduction of Kotlin. This new programming language, widely compared to Apple’s Swift, attempts to ease app development, enables clearer syntax and helps develop faster apps. For a demo, Google showed how a dozen of lines of Java code could be replaced by a single one of Kotlin!

Virtual Reality

Source: Google Events

Google Daydream project for VR got a major upgrade. Conjoined with Qualcomm, Google will now release standalone VR headsets. So now, you won’t need a phone, wires or PC to get your new virtual experience. Furthermore, it will have better tracking, most sophisticated apps and better user experience.

TPU

As already mentioned, Google’s future depends on AI. That’s why, in his keynote speech, Sundar Pichai announced the new Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which are next-generation chips to enhance machine learning algorithms. These new chips will significantly speed up Google’s platform for cloud computing. Additionally, as the TPUs are optimized to work with TensorFlow, Google’s open-source deep learning platform, we can expect to soon have powerful machine learning apps in our Android devices.

All Things Android

Several new updates were announced for Android developers. First, is the release of the new Android Studio 3, which will support Kotlin, enable faster Gradle build and ease app development with other tools. Second, Android Instant Apps are finally available to all developers. Instant Apps lets users run them without installing! Third, Android Things enable developers to create connected devices with greater ease, thus letting them explore the world of IoT.

These are just the top 10 announcements at Google I/O 2017. Go ahead and check out the full list of Google announcements here.

Release initially on November 9, 2015, Google’s open source platform for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning called TensorFlow, has had a huge impact on AI research. TensorFlow has helped researchers predict cancer, ease machine translation, enhance image recognition, and speed up speech recognition. In February this year, Google announced that they were “excited to see people using TensorFlow in over 6000 open-source repositories online.“ Today, major companies like Uber, Twitter, Snapchat, Qualcomm, Airbnb, Ebay and several others implement TensorFlow.

The Launch of TensorFlow Lite

Unfortunately, TensorFlow was primarily for computers, until now. In Google’s I/O, Dave Burke, the vice president of engineering for Android, announced the soon-to-be-released TensorFlow Lite for mobile. He said “TensorFlow Lite will leverage a new neural network API to tap into silicate specific accelerators, and over time we expect to see DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) specifically designed for neural network inference and training.” He further added “We think these new capabilities will help power the next generation of on-device speech processing, visual search, augmented reality, and more.”

This new library will allow developers to build Machine Learning apps which run faster while being less expensive on the system. The framework will enable development of deep learning models, and thus bring AI with a greater impact to the mobile platform. We could expect social media apps to become smarter by giving better recommendations. Photo, video or document editing apps could soon have cooler tools, enabling higher customizability and enhancing ease of use. New games could have better Augmented Reality graphics and smoother gameplay. Speech recognition and translation apps would become more user friendly, and way smarter. Most importantly, TensorFlow Lite will enable smaller companies to develop high quality AI apps, thus giving them an opportunity to grow significantly.

Any AI software requires training a huge dataset, which remains a major task, and a task which is computationally too expensive to be handled by smartphones. So in spite of TensorFlow Lite, the training of the models would still have to be performed on the cloud. But as Burke mentioned, Android O will introduce “a new framework” to hardware to enable accelerated neural computations. We can be sure that the future will see several modifications not only in software, but in hardware too. Thus, powered with these new technologies, we can push AI to new limits.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence, or simply AI, is the broad umbrella term describing computer systems attempting to mimic human-like intelligence. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” Today, the areas of AI technology are primarily Robotics, Machine Learning, Machine Vision and Natural Language Processing. But the key benefit of AI in business is Predictive Analytics. Using AI algorithms, enterprises can grow exponentially to gain a significant competitive advantage over their peers. Venture Scanner reveals the exponential growth of funding in AI startups, with 2016 seeing over $ 2.5 Billion.

Machine Learning (ML)

The subfield of AI called Machine Learning (ML) focuses on developing algorithms that can help computer systems learn automatically, without being explicitly programmed. To accomplish this task, a wide range of algorithms have been developed such as Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Means, Decision Trees, Random Forests, Naive Bayes, PCA and lastly, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Venture Scanner reveals that over $ 3.5 billion has been invested in ML applications with over 400 companies investing in the field.

Deep Learning (DL)

But today, the new buzzword ruling the market is Deep Learning (DL), and this technique was born out of ANNs. Not only is it insanely popular, but it is slowly wiping out all other techniques of ML. Deep Learning uses multi-layered neural nets and learns by crunching a large amount of data. Though the core idea was presented in the ’60s, it is only today with the availability of data and powerful Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) that it proved successful. The recent accomplishments of DL were in the field of Machine Vision, Machine Translation, Speech Recognition, Automated Game Playing and Self Driving Vehicles.

20 Best Platforms for AI

Currently, instead of selling their AI software directly, the tech giants are developing platforms to implement Machine Learning and Deep Learning, which will allow customers to build mobile applications on them. And therefore, even smaller companies can develop state-of-the-art software using AI without getting lost in the nitty-gritty of the algorithmic technicalities. Here are 20 of the most popular platforms and APIs:

1. AlchemyAPI
2. Amazon Machine Learning
3. API.ai
4. AT&T Speech
5. BigML
6. Caffe
7. CNTK
8. Deeplearning4j
9. DiffBot
10. DMTK
11. Google Cloud Prediction API
12. IBM Watson
13. Infosys Mana
14. KAI
15. Mahout
16. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
17. OpenCyc
18. PredictionIO
19. TensorFlow
20. Wit

Today in the world, AI is the biggest game-changer which is causing technology to advance faster than ever before. With the huge availability of data and open-source platforms, it is extremely easy for enterprises to implement AI. Therefore, if you fail to plunge into AI today, you might just find yourself out of business in a few years.