Google's annual developer conference returned to a live audience at its Mountain View amphitheatre on Wednesday, 11 May 2022, and packed hardware, Android and a great deal of artificial intelligence into two hours. For a Bangladeshi viewer the moment to remember came when chief executive Sundar Pichai showed Google's new PaLM language model answering a question posed in Bangla, and explaining its reasoning, despite having been trained on very little Bangla text. The point of the demo was that the same model could soon do it for hundreds of languages.
Hardware
- Pixel 6a, $449. Google's own Tensor chip in a cheaper body, with the 12-megapixel camera system, a 6.1-inch screen and five years of security updates. Pre-orders open 21 July.
- Pixel Buds Pro, $199. Google's first earbuds with active noise cancelling, seven hours of listening with it on, a custom audio chip and Bluetooth multipoint. Also 21 July.
- Pixel Watch. The long-rumoured Google smartwatch, running Wear OS 3 with Fitbit health tracking built in, arrives in the autumn alongside the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, which were shown briefly with a new camera bar.
- Pixel Tablet. An Android tablet on Tensor, coming in 2023; Google is back in tablets.
- AR glasses. The closing surprise: a prototype pair of glasses that shows a live transcript and translation of the person speaking to you, floating in your field of view. No date, no price.
Software and AI
Android 13, already in beta, refines Android 12's "Material You" theming, lets you set a language per app and tightens permissions. Google Wallet returns as one place for cards, transit passes, vaccination records and, eventually, digital IDs. Google Maps gets Immersive View, a photorealistic 3D fly-through of cities built from Street View and aerial imagery. Google Translate adds 24 languages, including several from South Asia. On the AI side, LaMDA 2 opens to testers through an "AI Test Kitchen" app, multisearch gains a "near me" option so you can photograph a dish and find who serves it nearby, and YouTube gets auto-translated captions on mobile. A new My Ad Center lets users say which ad topics they do and do not want.
What lands in Bangladesh
Pixel phones are not officially sold here, so the 6a will be a grey import at a premium. The software is another matter: Android 13 will reach Samsung, Xiaomi and Realme phones over the next year, the Translate and Maps updates arrive on every phone automatically, and the Bangla-speaking PaLM is the clearest signal yet that the next generation of Google products will not treat Bangla as an afterthought.
