One impact of the Covid 19 lockdown is that many of the worlds biggest and best tech conferences have moved online. I am being much more selective this year, but on hearing that Google I/O was moving online and would be free to attend, I was very keen to attend.

As you may expect, the conference was very well organised and run. Although I may be some way off from owning an Android 12 handset, having some background as to what is being introduced was amazing and will help me to support users of Mozilla apps on Android.

Aside from the Android news, I attended a presentation that introduced developers to Tensorflow.js. My earlier experience of Tensorflow was that it is big and heavy to use, but Tensorflow.js is a revelation. The session walked us through how to build an image recognising tool that could be embedded in a web page – a great piece of event “digital swag” that redefined how AI can be deployed. 


It is available as a Google Codelab at https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/tensorflowjs-object-detection?hl=en&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fcodelabs.developers.google.com%2F#0