At the conclusion of Build the resounding idea was that as developers we are empowered to develop code for any platform on any platform, additionally Microsoft is still aggressively pushing the idea of productivity in a maturing virtual world through devices like HoloLens. This is both a powerful idea and one that will bolster the enterprise narrative for Microsoft for many years to come. It could be firmly argued that Microsoft is turning into IBM at incredible rate (but that is a different post).
In contrast to the coding ubiquity promised by Microsoft, what jumped out about the Google I/O keynote was the transformative potential of Google Lens technologies is that it can identify objects in the real world with your smartphone camera.
"Google Lens is a set of vision-based computing capabilities that can understand what you're looking at and help you take action based on that information” - Sundar Pichai
The stage demos were impressive pointing the camera at a flower and recognizing the type, or viewing a router and automatically joining a wireless network by recognizing a network name and password label. Impressive!
What is important about this strategy is that we now have another path to understand, catalogue and search the real world. The current web has forced us to duplicate our real world in digital text such that it becomes easier to recognize, reference and recall. So someone had to laboriously convert what was seen, observed and heard into to text, and search engines have gotten really good at understanding those pages with remarkable accuracy and precision. Imagine the way in which we search html for keywords today, how searches can decipher intent and use html links to determine relative rankings.
Now combine this idea with machine intelligence which will allow us to search audio and, more importantly, video. Our searches could see context within a video; the clothes being worn; the car being driven; the locations being passed; the facial responses and the sources that inspired them.
There is an entirely new layer of data within the grasp of a company that understands search, and the ways in which it can be catalogue and monetized.
The future looks bright, and Google can see it!
Comments are closed.