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5 Google I/O announcements we wish Apple would have made first

Macworld

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July 2023

Google has some intriguing ideas than Apple needs to draw inspiration from

- ROMAN LOYOLA

5 Google I/O announcements we wish Apple would have made first

This spring saw a host of innovations announced at developer conferences. Google's I/O conference kicked off the fun in May, followed by Microsoft's Build in late May, and finally Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, fave.co/3zmnbvC (the one we care about most) in June.

Developer conference keynotes are fun because you get to see what the companies are working on and what new products and features are in the future. And sometimes we get a bunch of cool new stuff non-developers care about too.

That was the case with the Google I/O keynote, which brought numerous new products and features-several of which we hope Apple paid close attention to.

Here are five Google I/O announcements we wish had come from Apple instead.

1. MAGIC EDITOR IN GOOGLE PHOTOS

Google used its Al research to make some cool features for its Google Photos app. It recently brought Magic Eraser (fave.co/ 3HsKHM1), a previous Pixel exclusive that lets users easily remove unwanted people and items from a photo, to Google One subscribers. Now it's expanding the feature in a big way.

At Google I/O this year, the company revealed its next Al photo tool, Magic Editor (fave.co/436Innv). This feature uses outpainting (fave.co/3Wx6JU5), which uses artificial intelligence to create an extension of an image that maintains the style of the original. It's another way of filling in an image gap during an edit, but it allows for more editing flexibility than Magic Eraser.

One example Google demonstrated involved a photo of a child holding balloons while sitting on a bench. With Magic Editor, the child, bench, and balloons were selected and moved, and the software created extensions of the items that were cut off by the edge of the photo.

Macworld

This story is from the July 2023 edition of Macworld.

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