Google recently introduced ML KIT, a machine-learning module fully integrated in its Firebase mobile development platform and available for both iOS and Android. With this new Firebase module, Google simplifies the creation of machine-learning powered applications on mobile phones and solves some of the challenges of implementing computationally intense features on mobile devices. ML Kit allows mobile developers to create machine-learning features based on some of the models available in its deep-learning Vision API such as image labeling, OCR and face detection. ML Kit is available both for Android and iOS applications directly within the Firebase platform alongside other Google Cloud based modules such as authentication and storage. ML Kit aims at solving several of the challenges specific to mobile devices which are raised by the computationally intensive operations required for artificial intelligence.

Google has just announced a brand new update to their music streaming service, Google Play Music. The new design and features will begin rolling out to Android, iOS and the web starting this week, and Google says it will be made available to 62 countries around the world. As with most of these app updates though, it will be rolled out gradually to users. So, you can either wait patiently for the update to be pushed to your device, or you can sideload the update when it becomes available. The first thing you'll notice about this update is its new design.

Maybe the machines won't take over, but Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, thinks machine learning might. The combination of cloud, crowdsourced information, and machine learning "will be the basis for every fundamental and hugely successful IPO win in the next five years," he said during this morning's keynote at GCP NEXT, the developer conference for Google Cloud Platform. Schmidt is prone to sweeping statements. But having watched computing transform many times in 45 years -- he was a Sun Microsystems bigwig when the company launched Java -- he said he felt qualified to predict that machine learning could lead to truly new innovations, the kind that can't yet be envisioned. Google is now offering the technology to cloud customers in the form of Cloud Machine Learning, an alpha application launched today.