Google’s AI Revolution: The Future of Android

Google's AI revolution is the future of Android and will get a boost from artificial intelligence

The days before Google's annual software conference, executives showed an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm for… wallpaper. Background image for a phone. especially for Android phones, wallpaper that transforms, breathes, and undulates. artificial intelligence-generated wallpaper that appears once you follow a few prompts on your phone's screen.

The important term here is "generative AI." Currently, both large and small IT companies are pinning their futures on this subset of artificial intelligence. One of the pioneers in this field is Alphabet-owned Google; as Google officials like to point out, the "T" in OpenAI's ChatGPT really stands for transformer technology that Google first unveiled in 2017. And Google has spent years developing chatbot technology that mimics human interaction.

However, since both OpenAI and Microsoft (which finances OpenAI) launched their GenAI conversation tools before Google had the chance to deploy its tool, named Bard, Google is now largely seen as being behind in generative AI. Even Google went into "code red" after the release of ChatGPT, allocating additional resources to creating AI products.

Therefore, it makes it natural that Google would utilize I/O, its yearly developer conference, which got underway today in Mountain View, California, as a platform to promote its most recent AI technologies. The theme running across the entire program is AI. It also plays a key role in two new Android-specific capabilities, showing how keen Google is to release practical generative AI products and reach potentially billions of users.

According to Dave Burke, vice president of engineering for Android, "We're in this position where Google has pioneered much of the seminal research, particularly around this class of large language models, which is the foundation of this nonlinear step forward in technology." "At the same time, we have these substantial Android surfaces. Additionally, we can combine the two.

According to Chirag Dekate, vice president and analyst at Gartner, "For Google, the Android ecosystem offers a platform to prove its innovative AI portfolio at a scale that not all of their cloud peers can compete with."

Google claims that its image-generation model is trained on works of art that are in the public domain, therefore it is probably attempting to avoid any potentially contentious ethical issues related to AI art copyright. The general public won't have access to it immediately away, either: Starting next month, the wallpapers will only be available for Google's own Pixel phones.

So… wallpaper? Your phone now has an AI Van Gogh as a result of Google's groundbreaking research. Yes, that's true, but according to Burke, "It might seem obvious or simple in retrospect, but this is one of the ways we're thinking that AI can be applied in a very user-centric, responsible way."

"As a corporation, we have a long history of using AI. According to Sameer Samat, vice president of product management for Android and the Google Play app store, "The developments in generative AI are really interesting. But in terms of incorporating them into products, these aren't that ancient. Therefore, it's quite early to talk about commercializing everything.

The new personalization options and generative AI on Android are just a few components of a much larger software update. Along with support for larger screens (like the Pixel Fold), battery-saving capabilities, and improved security features like passkeys in place of passwords, Android 14 began rolling out as beta software in February. Google announced today that there are more than 3 billion active Android phones, tablets, vehicles, and TVs in use worldwide. On the TV front, Google asserts that Android TV OS is the most widely shipped streaming platform worldwide. Additionally, WearOS, its wearable device software, is expanding quickly.