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Recap of Android Summit 2017

I recently attended and spoke at Android Summit , an Android conference organized by the folks at Capital One. Special shoutout to Jared A Sheehan, Michael Jones and the entire organizing committee for running a fabulous event which raised $6000 for Women who Code. All speakers received a Phillips Hue Starter Kit as a speaker gift which I've used to toggle and dim my living room lights via Amazon Echo. So much fun! I had a prior commitment and could only attend Day 1 but here are my highlights. Process & Workflow A common theme on Day 1 was process and workflow talks which tied in beautifully with Kelly Shuster 's keynote. Kelly is an excellent story teller. In her keynote, she connected a story of communication from her theatre background to how developers, designers and testers need to work together to reduce boiler plate conversations when designing and developing apps. I gave a similar talk earlier this year at  Chicago Roboto  with my co-worker and designer  J

Google I/O 2017 Recap: Things I learned

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Google I/O 2017 was a lot of fun and informative. I wish I had Hermione's Time-Turner as there were many talks to attend and many amazing people to meet. Here are some things I learned at I/O: AI & Machine Learning This year, I/O was all about AI on every Google product. A product mentioned at the Keynote was Google Lens which enables your smartphone to take pictures of an image like a flower and identify it. That's pretty helpful for a hobbyist gardener like me.  I also happened to drop by their  Android Experiments  sandbox and play the AI powered  Quick Draw  with fellow I/O attendees. Google Assistant  Google's voice assistant is available on many devices now - not just on your Google Home & Pixel phones but on Android TV as well as iPhone. It's also available on more languages and has an  Assistant SDK . You can build an app fairly quickly with Actions on Google and there is a challenge at  g.co/ActionsChallenge . You could possib