Android Show

Google revealed new Android features on May 12th. The announcement video has details on each feature, it's honestly more fun to watch than recent Apple videos.

I picked three of these features to talk about because they make me feel better, relatively, about where and how AI is going to change our lives. I am skipping the glassyness, renaming Gemini again, the fact that they are helping Meta make Instagram stickier, Paris Hilton (yes), and the over-emphasis on agentic and intelligence system.

Here is the full video:

Rambler (10:01)

Google built a new speech-to-text processor that listens to what you say, but doesn't spit it out verbatim. If you make small mistakes, say too many uuummms, or change your mind on the fly—just like how we speak naturally—Rambler gives you a cleaned up, coherent text; not an embarrassing transcript you then have to edit on a small keyboard.

I really like this, because it is a very good, salient use of machine learning. I am hoping they do the processing on the device, which would make Rambler a relatively eco-friendly feature.

Create My Widget (12:10)

With Android 17, you can just type what kind of widget you want, and it generates it. Wow 🤯

I get that this is a demo and things are controlled. I have a feeling that the system isn't going through a full development round from scratch; I think it uses a templatized system. Nothing (the phone company) has been working on a similar approach for some time.