Jefferson Graham visits the Google "Sandbox" at the I/O developer's conference, where futuristic, new technologies are on display. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - The Google I/O conference brings developers--the folks who make apps for phones, computers, TVs and the like--together for a status update on all that Google is up to. The hope is that they'll start creating apps for new technologies being touted. So we spent time at the I/O conference talking to developers about what excites them about Google's future. Google demonstrated a new way of mapping, using a tablet to monitor the insides of buildings, at its Sandbox area of I/O, devoted to the newest technologies being introduced, and the exhibit easily drew the longest lines and biggest crowds.

Google is launching a messaging app, and it's going to start butting into your conversations. Allo, as the app has been named, was unveiled at the opening event of the company's I/O developer conference in San Francisco. It works similarly to most other messaging apps, but also has a built-in AI assistant. Google's assistant scans your incoming messages, so it can suggest good responses. It can do this for regular texts or picture messages, and seemed impressively smart in on-stage demonstrations.

That's the argument made by a group of Danish researchers who released a data set on nearly 70,000 users of the popular dating website. The researchers used an automated tool called a "scraper" that captures parts of a webpage--a possible violation of the website's terms of use. These users had answered questions on intimate topics like drug use and sexual preferences. The researchers took no steps to deidentify the data set when they released it, despite it being possible to reidentify many of the profiles. When the researchers were called out about this lapse on Twitter, one of them shrugged it off with the flip statement "Data is already public."

Maybe the reason why Google isn't giving a formal name to its personal assistant software is that it's more than just one thing. Introduced at I/O this week is a new Android Awareness API that bundles all the sensor data from your smartphone or other Android device and presents it to apps, which can then act on that input to automatically assist you. "You can use this information to build more assistive and aware applications," says Google's Bhavik Singh, product manager of the Awareness API. He offers a number of scenarios where smart assistive apps could help: projecting the day's weather forecast on the nearest Chromecast TV, beaming out traffic alerts to your Google Home speaker to avoid being late for a meeting, or tagging photos with weather and activity data as well as location. In order to be so savvy, however, apps will need access to seven different parameters: the time and place (both type of place and precise location), your physical activity, any nearby wireless beacons, whether or not you have headphones connected, and the weather.

With much of what Google announced during the first day of its I/O developer conference focused on helping users answer questions before they even think of them, artificial intelligence is proving critical for the company's strategy. "Google is betting the farm on artificial intelligence (A.I.) and they need to because Microsoft and Facebook aren't too far behind," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "A.I. will determine the next-generation experience with all electronics. It essentially predicts what users want before they know they do. A.I. is the next big frontier, and Google has always been a pioneer in A.I." During the keynote speech on Wednesday, the company unveiled several upcoming products, including its Google Assistant, Google Home device, the Allo chat app and the Duo video chat app.

Google has revealed a new personal assistant for around the house that can control, run and organise your entire home using just your voice. The device, a voice-activated speaker called Google Home forms the centre of a Google plan to use artificial intelligence in computing to help give every user "their own individual Google" by becoming personal to them, according to the firm's chief. CEO Sundar Pichai used the keynote presentation at the firm's I/O developer conference in California to reveal new apps, software and a voice activated personal assistant that take advantage of new, more intelligent Google software that is better at understanding context. Mr Pichai said of the new Google Home personal assistant connects to WiFi and can control other connected appliances: "Computing is poised to evolve beyond just phones. It will be about the context. The new, more intelligent software also focuses on understanding context to answer queries and has been built into the existing Google ...

Thousands of people gathered near Google's headquarters on Wednesday to hear the company's vision for the future. In past years, Google has used its developers' conference to unveil all sorts of shiny new toys and services. Not all of them have been smash hits, however. Google Glass had its big coming-out party at I/O in 2012, after all. Google TV was the star of 2010. And remember the Nexus Q, the orb-shaped music player that never even reached the market?

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference. There were more details of a new version of Android; new messaging and video-calling apps; a built-in new VR platform for Android; and a good-looking Amazon Echo-like smart speaker called Google Home. There was even a cool new research project called Instant Apps that will let users run portions of apps from the web without installing them first. But the biggest theme stressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants, over and over again throughout the two-hour keynote, was that Google is doubling down on artificial intelligence as the next great phase of computing.

Martine Rothblatt, futurist and founder of Sirius XM, says by the time her biotech company's genetically modified transplant organs are in use, drones will likely deliver them. Rothblatt gave her view of the future at The Washington Post's Transformers conference Wednesday. Her United Therapeutics company, which has offices is Silver Spring, Md. and Research Triangle Park, N.C., is raising pigs with genome modifications its researchers hope will improve the animals' organs for transplant recipients. Pigs organs, because of their size and function, make good transplant material, but often the patient is trading their current disease for "a chronic organ rejection kind-of-disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most, people who receive transplants," she said. The company hopes to begin trials on organ transplants from genetically-modified pigs by the end of the decade, with regulatory approval ten years from now, Rothblatt said.

Google Home makes one heck of a first impression: An adorable little Bluetooth speaker, with a hyper-advanced personal assistant that promises to do things Amazon's Echo can't even dream of. You can even choose the color. On paper, Home seems superior to Echo in so many ways that it doesn't feel like a fair fight. That also may well be true in practice! But the race between Home and Echo may turn out to be a little more complicated than specs.