Key Client Takeaways from Google I/O 2023

It’s our favorite time of the year again! We’re diving into the key client takeaways from Google I/O 2023. We know that staying on top of the latest tech trends is essential for any business aiming to succeed in today’s fast-paced world. And Google I/O, the legendary annual developer conference, once again delivered some jaw-dropping innovations and strategic insights. From hardware to virtual assistants to Flutter and beyond, check out some of Google’s initiatives that will shape our business landscape in the near future and what you can do to stay on-top of these latest developments.

Hardware

• Tablets – Google has been making a bigger push into improving their tablet experience, with nearly every Google app having tablet-optimized experiences.
• Take Action: If your metrics show any amount of tablet devices using your app, consider optimizing your main user flows.
• Foldables – With Google creating an official foldable, they can no longer be ignored. Users will take advantage of multi-tasking and some leanback experiences, and potentially spend more time in apps than they have in the past.

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Take Action: Tablet optimizations will double as foldable optimizations, but also think about if there are any foldable-specific features you might offer to users.

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Assistant is Dead, Long Live Bard

• The writing on the wall came several months ago when Google announced that global Assistant integration was being sunset. Discoverability is was poor, especially on devices without screens, and adoption was minimal, so now the Assistant can help you launch into an app, but further action will be handled by the app on your device. This isn’t saying voice control is dead, but the method of it is now part of an application, not a separate application to be built.

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Take Action: Plan on adding your voice experiences into your main app, and coach users on how to use voice commands to streamline their actions.

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AI, AI, I/O

• Google is taking their years of AI & ML research and beginning to integrate it into their consumer products, primarily because of competitors like ChatGPT and Bing search. This will end up touching Gmail, Docs & Sheets, as well as text messaging and their translation products.
  Take Action: Consider where your users might want assistance in crafting their own content.
• Google Play is even getting the AI treatment, where store listings will be able to be created with assistance from AI-tools that integrated into the console.
  Take Action: Be on the lookout for these new tools as they roll out in the coming months.
• Vertex AI will allow building of custom models that are trained on your own data, leveraging a powerful generic model underneath for its general understanding. Imagine taking a college student and giving them a course on any topic you’d like, and knowing they’ll retain everything you teach them.

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Take Action: Start gathering the data you’d want to train your own models on, whether that be intranet resources, product documentation, or even your business documents. You’ll soon be able to easily train an AI on all that material, and will be able to ask it questions that it’ll be able to cite answers for.

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Our Hearts are a Flutter

• Flutter continues to see incremental improvements, with some of the biggest changes coming to Flutter support for the Web. Flutter apps can now be embedded inside existing web pages, and WebAssembly improves performance across the board. Flutter for mobile devices has also been improved, with faster rendering pipelines on iOS & Android that will mean even smoother experiences.

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Take Action: Consider a Flutter implementation if you’re looking to build a mobile web app alongside your iOS & Android apps, as the experience could be nearly identical and use the same core codebase.

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That’s all for now! Google I/O 2023 showcased transformative technologies and strategic insights that demand action. From hardware advancements to AI integration and Flutter improvements, businesses need to embrace these developments to stay ahead in the evolving digital landscape. Stay tuned for our latest insights about the ever-changing landscape of all things Google!

Image via Google