When Sundar Pichai took the stage on May 18 during the Google I/O event at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, the excitement in the crowd was palpable. There was a buzz in the tech community that the Google CEO would make some major announcements revolving around machine learning and speciality virtual reality. While some of these rumours did not translate into reality, the event was a great success with many new launches and exciting product announcements and a strong emphasis towards artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Here are some of the highlights of the Google I/O keynote:

Google Assistant

Google Assistant is the next generation of Google Search, which supports conversational style search abilities. It makes search more natural and obviously voice-based. You can have a two-way dialogue with Google understanding the context. So you ask Google “Who’s Justin Bieber?” followed by “Play his latest song”, Google servers will understand that ‘his’ stands for Justin since you asked about him last.

Google Allo

Google Allo is Google’s new messaging app that also draws from artificial intelligence. This app for mobile devices can connect to your Google account and has some great features such as end-to-end encryption, incognito mode, Smart replies, emoji, custom stickers and photo integration. Allo also integrates chatbots such as OpenTable to book restaurant table from inside the chat app. With this app, Google hopes to become the preferred chat client competing with rivals such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Google Duo

Google Duo is Google’s dedicated app for video calling like Apple’s FaceTime app. Duo has an interesting feature called Knock-Knock, which lets you view the caller’s stream before accepting the video call so you can see who is calling and what they are doing. This app will be available soon for iOS and Android platforms.

Google Home Speaker

Google Home is a voice-controlled smart digital assistant à la Amazon Echo. The device lets you interact via voice commands and can not only answer your query and play music but it also lets you control your smart home devices. This device, which is built on the Chromecast standard, leverages Google’s artificial intelligence prowess. Google Home is coming soon.

Google Daydream

While everyone was expecting Google to release their own VR headset, it went a step further and announced a brand new VR platform called Daydream. It is built on Android N and brings a standard immersive VR experience. Google also released reference designs for hardware and software to design Daydream-enabled VR experiences. With this announcement, Google seems to be going towards building an entire VR ecosystem. So instead of becoming one of the headset makers, Google wants to own the operating system for VR headset. In a way, it is good since it will bring a common standard for all VR developers. Daydream Home gives access to all your VR contents, which will include VR-based games and movies. Google Cardboard was the catalyst that brought momentum to VR for common users and now it seems that every major player wants to jump into the fray.

Android N

The next iteration of Google’s Android brings various new features to the much loved mobile operating system. Android N has split-screen multitasking, a new set of emoji, a picture-in-picture mode, better battery optimisation and more. Android N also provides for smoother and better graphic performance and security enhancements.

Android Wear 2.0

Android Wear system has evolved to 2.0 and now you can get any data (such as weather and notifications) to be displayed on any watch face. The platform also provides for tighter integration between various apps such as fitness related apps where your phone does not need to be turned on. The standalone apps make the watch platform much more exciting.