Google I/O 2018: Android P Beta, Google News Overhaul & More

Google just wrapped up its 2018 I/O keynote at Mountain View, and here are some of the biggest announcements from the packed two-hour event:

• Android P Beta with user interface and battery improvements, and focus on simplicity, AI smarts and digital wellbeing
• Google Lens integration into camera, with capabilities to copy text from real world into your phone and identify clothing and other items (watch out Pinterest!)
• Google Maps refresh with AR-powered walking directions (through visual positioning system) and new social sharing features and personalised recommendations about activities, local businesses and restaurants (makes me wonder why they sold Zagat, when they could have just integrated it into the app)
• Enable natural conversations in Google Assistant and support for offloading real-world tasks over the phone (like booking appointments) to AI (through a new feature called Google Duplex that lets an artificial intelligence mimic a human voice to make appointments)
• Smart Compose in Gmail to let the AI almost draft emails by itself
• Completely overhauled Google News experience with subscription support (ported from Play Newsstand) and focus on getting the complete picture
• Colorise old photos and recognise documents in images and convert them to PDFs in Google Photos
• Support for running Linux apps on Chrome OS
• Next generation Tensor Processing Unit chips with improved performance (eight times powerful than last year's) to better train machine learning models
• Material Design revamp with new tools like Material Theming that lets developers add variety to their user interfaces while still abiding by Google's core design principles
• And many more...