Google Photos' New Suggested Actions Recommends Changes to Your Photos and More

At the Google I/O 2018, company CEO Sundar Pichai has unveiled a host of new features. He touted some impressive Google Photos features that leverage the company's AI prowess. One of the key announcements is the arrival of Suggested Actions on Google Photos. Currently, Photos is one of the most accessible use cases of artificial intelligence that Google has. But now, it will get more new features, such as smart sharing and PDF conversions. Additionally, it will now be able to colourise black and white photos, as well as isolate colour and make the background black and white. It got a lot of cheers from the audience present at the event. Additionally, the company also announced several other features, especially for the Google Assistant.

Google says there are over 5 billion photos viewed every day, but added there's more to do with photos than "just viewing". With the new Google Photos feature, called Suggested Actions, the process will get more productive. It suggests and recommends actions to the user in a number of cases, and if the user agrees with the suggestion, a single tap will perform the action. For instance, if you are looking at pictures from a wedding, the new feature will see that you have three pictures with one of your friends, and suggest you send these pictures to them. You'll need to tap the suggestion to share.

Another example demonstrated by Google shows that if one of the pictures in Photos is too dark, the AI will recommend brightening it. If it detects other possible changes, like rotating a sideways image, it will suggest them. Also, if it spots a document in your image, it will suggest converting it to PDF for you. This could become one of the popular features in Google Photos, and it also drew one of the loudest applauses from the crowd present at the event. These new features are starting to roll out to Google Photos from today, and should make their way across the globe in the next couple of months.

Additionally, the AI can even stylise your pictures, similar to what Google Photos' Assistant already does, but now it can even recolour old black-and-white shots. Pichai says that all these features are going to be rolling out to Google Photos users "in the next couple of months." He also said that such features have been achievable thanks to Google's Tensorflow processing units - TPU 3.0 - that helps Google manage more data quickly.

At the event, Google also unveiled the Google Photos partner programme, giving developers tools to support Google Photos in their products, allowing users to access Google Photos from third-party apps and services.

We discussed Android P, Google Assistant, Google Photos, and also the most important things that Google did not mention during its I/O 2018 keynote, on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.