Google Unveils a Suite of New Features for AI Apps Development

Highlights:

• The Google DeepMind India team announced Project Vaani, a new project in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science that seeks to capture the variety of the hundreds of spoken languages in that nation.
• The Composition of Language Models framework, or CALM, has been made publicly available for developers who wish to mix customized LLMs with Google’s Gemma models.

Google LLC unveiled a suite of new features. The developer-oriented updates got revealed at I/O Connect Bengaluru event in India. The latest integration between Android Studio and Project IDX enables developers to create apps from any device with the help of web browsers.

It also unveiled Project Oscar, an AI agent for managing open-source software projects, and Firebase AI Monitoring, a new dashboard that provides real-time insights into generative AI behavior and performance.

Karthik Padmanabhan, the lead for developer relations at Google India, noted that the four million developers in India are at the forefront of AI development currently, using the technology to solve a variety of issues, especially linguistic ones. Google plans to offer them all the resources necessary to support their initiatives.

For example, the Google DeepMind India team announced Project Vaani, a new project in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science that seeks to capture the variety of the nation’s hundreds of spoken languages.

IndicGenBench, a benchmark that developers may use to assess the performance of large language models trained on indic languages, was developed because of the research. Furthermore, the Composition of Language Models framework, or CALM, has been made publicly available for developers who wish to mix customized LLMs with Google’s Gemma models.

In the latest iteration of Project IDX, an online integrated development environment based on Visual Studio Code, Padmanabhan revealed that the company is launching an early version of a browser-based Android Studio on Project IDX. By doing this, developers may easily launch a web-based development environment that allows them to code, construct, and test native Android applications on any device and from any place.

Google is enhancing Firebase, its platform for mobile and web application development, by introducing alpha test support for the Go programming language. This update aims to streamline the creation of efficient and scalable Go-based applications by integrating them into Firebase’s more user-friendly environment, as explained by Google.

Developers can track the functionality and performance of their LLMs in production using the Firebase AI Monitoring dashboard preview. According to Padmanabhan, the dashboard would provide notifications on the usage of those features, their behavior, and any errors or inconsistencies.

In the meantime, Project Oscar was created to assist open-source project maintainers in staying up to date on the most recent state of the projects they oversee. Maintaining open-source projects may be labor-intensive, as Padmanabhan noted. Some of the most well-known projects draw thousands of volunteers who release hundreds of new commits daily.

Project Oscar is a reference for an AI agent capable of monitoring all these updates. It was first intended for Go, which, at this writing, has over 93,000 commits and over 2,000 contributors. However, according to Padmanabhan, Project Oscar is easily adaptable to serve other open-source initiatives.

Generative AI is also included in the Flutter software development kit, which is used to create user interfaces for applications. According to the company, the new AI-generated UI functionality was launched recently in early access preview and can dynamically assemble and personalize UI elements based on natural language inputs.

Lastly, Padmanabhan declared that it will help 10,000 Indian generative AI businesses in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in India. The support includes Google Cloud credits as well as an upgraded startup program curriculum to give founders the expertise they need to advance with AI. To find India’s next wave of AI pioneers, Google will also hold an annual hackathon competition across the country.