On September 20, The Google Developer Conference China 2018 started with thousands of people playing “pictoggle songs”. Google made a large number of new releases for Chinese developers and consumers, including applications, machine learning, Wear OS and so on.

Join China’s custom Wear OS

Lin Kehan, business manager of Wear OS by Google China, said at the scene that Wear OS in China is growing at an 80% year-on-year rate. As far as we know, China has become the second largest market for Wear OS by Google.

The characteristics of The Chinese version of Wear OS are mainly reflected in three aspects. The first is to add more health data monitoring, through cooperation with go out ask, in the system to add “ask health”, “ask heart rate”, “ask exercise” several monitoring heart rate, exercise.

Secondly, the interactive experience of reading notifications is optimized. Users can read multiple notifications from different sources at one time in the message interface, and also support the deletion by swiping.

There is also by going out to provide intelligent assistant services.

Wear OS’s customizations for the Chinese market include adding pollution data to weather alerts, providing information about city vehicle restrictions, and the ability to check stocks. It also supports quick launch of payment QR codes through cooperation with Alipay.

The feature of independently installed applications of Wear OS also makes many commonly used software in China appear on the watch through customization, such as Alipay for payment, Ctrip for travel, Didi for travel, and Sogou for map.

Wear OS by Google also emphasizes “5-second” interactions. Dennis, product lead at Wear OS by Google, said in an interview:

We find that the interaction between the user and the watch is not the same as the interaction between the smartphone. People can hold their phones and immerse themselves in social media all the time, but in the use of smartwatches, users are generally constantly walking, often taking only five seconds to look at them. So all of the interactions we’ve covered are for less than five seconds.

If you can process information in less than five seconds, Google thinks, you can get people back to the real world faster.

Google’s smartwatch operating system was first launched in 2014 as Android Wear and was renamed To Wear OS by Google in March. The emphasis on Google’s de-emphasis of Android means that they want both Android and iOS phones to be able to connect to Wear OS smartwatches.

▲ These watches all run Wear OS by Google

There are already more than 100 watches using Wear OS, ranging from a TicWatch Pro that costs around rmb1,500 to a Louis Vuitton collaboration that costs as much as $2,700. There are 20 watches running Wear OS in China.

▲ The Big Bang Referee

For The 2018 World Cup, official timing sponsor HUBLOT created a smart watch for referees called The Big Bang Referee, also running on The Wear OS. The watch is integrated with goal-line technology, so referees can receive accurate and timely information about goals on the pitch through the watch.

Wear OS by Google as a platform also means that they have diversified partners, including consumer electronics manufacturers, fashion and luxury goods, etc. Wear OS by Google also plans to release a sport-watch-related product in 2019, the company said in an interview.

In the past, xiaomi Wristband 3 with a price of 199 came into the market. Later, Apple Watch 4 came into the market. There are not many watches equipped with Wear OS in China, including Huawei Watch 1 and Moto 360. At this developer conference, three new watches were added, including Armani and Montblanc.

In the experience area, we tried a smart watch equipped with Wear OS by Google. The main interaction goes like this: swipe up to see notifications, slide down for a toolbar, swipe right for an intelligent assistant, swipe left for motion information, press a knob to bring up the app bar, and press hard on the dial page to change the dial style.

The Wear OS interface is the same for watches from Louis Vuitton and Fossil, Diesel, Huawei, Go Out and Ask. Is this going to be a dials and straps business?

In order to put Wear OS by Google on more Chinese wrist watches and turn Wear OS into the Android operating system on smartphones, Google has worked hard to localize.

▲ Watch equipped with Wear OS can control smart lights

Asked how they compete with rivals like Xiaomi, the head of Wear OS said:

What Google is doing is a platform and integrating its ai and machine learning skills into the system to provide more intelligent functions. They are now offering solutions for domestic users by letting local Chinese companies develop new watch apps.

Google’s focus remains on AI

The ability to play “pictograph songs” with friends was also introduced at the conference. Since its launch two months ago, the mini game has attracted more than one million users, and 500 million paintings have been correctly guessed by AI. Google hopes the “pictionary Song” will give Chinese developers more thought and inspiration on how to use AI.

One of Google’s magic weapons in ARTIFICIAL intelligence is TensorFlow, one of the most popular open source machine learning platforms in the world.

Liang Xinping, head of TensorFlow China, said that in the past year, the company has set up a “Google AI China Center” to promote collaboration and exchange between China and academic talent, and offered “crash courses in machine learning” to developers.

Next, they plan to launch the Machine learning Application Power Camp, where developers who sign up for the camp will receive mentoring from Google technologists and internships in machine learning projects.

Anna Goldie, Google’s AI software engineer, appeared to cheers from Chinese developers, speaking in a Mandarin accent familiar to them. TensorFlow has over 17 million downloads, 39,000 submissions, and 1,600 contributors.

TensorFlow has been downloaded more than 2 million times in China and is also used by companies including Zhihu, Fluent English, netease, Sinlang, JD.com and Xianyu.

Among them, Meituan and Dianping are mainly introduced as application cases, which are mainly used to process pictures uploaded by merchants and users.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Android’s release, and the Android 9 Pie will also have more new features.

These include adaptive batteries with built-in machine learning to predict user usage based on their habits; Seamless adaptation bangs; Remove SDK interface restrictions, app can use third-party cloud testing services and so on.

In addition, Flutter Release Preview 2 was released onsite as the last Preview Release before the 1.0 Release. Developers can use Flutter to develop native apps on iOS and Android platforms. Developers of Apps such as Xianyu, NOW Live, Jd.com and Meituan also use Flutter.

Chet Haase, head of Android Toolkit technology, said the number of Chinese developers using Android Studio has quadrupled in the past two years, and revenue from The Google Play Store for Chinese developers grew by 50% last year.

At Google’s Developer conference China 2018, there were long lines of people entering the building, shoulder to shoulder in the product exhibition area, and the aisles of some technology sharing sessions were filled with people. The feeling is: Google is here to stay.