Google Pixel 8 launch event: all the news

A lot of the cool stuff we’re seeing here today isn’t coming at launch. You’ll have to wait for future updates coming in December.

Yep, there’s a new feature called Zoom Enhance on the Pixel 8 Pro. It uses on-device processing to let you zoom in on parts of your photos and recreates fine detail. Like in the movies! It’s available in December via Feature Drop.

The phone can run up to 150x more computations than the largest model on Pixel 7. Magic Eraser looks like it gets a big improvement from this on-device processing, too. It’s available right away, says Rick.

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After all that Assistant with Bard barrage, Rick Osterloh is back onstage to give us a highlight reel of everything coming to Pixel. He’s showing off a demo of the Pixel phones creating summaries of long articles. He’s also saying the Pixel phones are the first to run foundation models directly on the device.

It’s coming to select testers first, then they’ll be expanding availability in the next few months. Also, it wrote a social caption for a cute puppy photo.

Google is shouting out its AI chatbot while we’re talking about Google Assistant. Sissie Hsiao is introducing Assistant with Bard, which will offer more generative capabilities. It can find your important emails and pull together information from different apps.

This demo of Video Boost shows how it’s supposed to make low-light scenarios much brighter. Except, to my eye, it looks kind of artificial. I lived in Tokyo for seven years, and the muddy contrast between the neon lights and dark alleys... doesn’t really feel like what I just saw. In my opinion.

Video Boost will offload some complex video AI processing to the cloud so it can edit every frame. That’s a whole lot of data to handle from a 4K video clip. It enables more robust HDR for video as well as Night Sight Video. It’s coming via a feature drop in December.

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In introducing Video Boost, Google’s just straight-up showing comparisons to the iPhone footage. Somebody in Cupertino is probably not loving that, but the folks in here are loving the extra spiciness.

Here’s a side-by-side crop of the before / after with the new Best Take feature. Would I use this? I have to admit I would; pretty hard to get the kids to sit still for a photo, and they did make those faces, after all!

There’s a new main 50-megapixel main camera sensor, an upgraded telephoto camera, and autofocus on the selfie camera. You’ll also get access to manual camera settings in the native camera app. You hear that, Apple?

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It was announced at I/O. It’s Google Photos’ new generative AI photo editor. We saw a demo showing object removal and fully moving one element in the scene and putting it somewhere else. Oh, and you can mess with the lighting and sky. It looks intense.

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This video demonstrating the Best Take feature speaks to the vain among us. The main character of this vid keeps haranguing his friends for being “photo ruiners.” As someone who always blinks in the group photo, I, once again, am feeling attacked during this keynote.

But what was that pot-shot at the lactose intolerant among us?

Best Take is a new Google Photos feature that lets you choose the expressions you want on the faces in your photos when you take a series of photos. Parents are stoked.

We’re getting better quality from the 2x optical crop zoom mode and improvements to low-light video, like faster autofocus. Audio Magic Eraser uses machine learning to identify different sounds and in videos and separate them so you can minimize the ones you don’t want. Also, adorable baby video alert!

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If you’ve got a Tensor-equipped Pixel and Pixel Watch, you’ll also be able to screen calls from your watch. Hanging up on robocalls got a lot of claps from the room, and it’s great that we, as humans, can all agree that we want to tell the robocallers to get lost in as many ways as possible.

The feature will come via a feature drop later this year.

Google’s Monika Gupta mentioned how the Pixel phones can now tell what language you’re speaking and switch back and forth between multiple languages. Big if true! I’ve had a lot of trouble when dictating Konglish (a mix of Korean and English) with friends and family. For immigrant kids or multilingual folks, it’ll be such a boon whenever a company truly nails this.

Monika says it runs more ML models and more complex models, which brings AI enhancements to just about every part of the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. It’ll read webpages out loud for you with a “more natural” voice and can read them in different languages. Call Screen is getting an upgrade, and the virtual assistant speaks more naturally.

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Pixel 8 Pro has one, for some reason. Google is applying to the FDA to let you use it to read body temperature. It’s giving real mid-2020 product map vibes.

We got some lip service toward repairability for the Pixel 8 and Google’s partnership with iFixit. And yet, this wasn’t addressed for the Pixel Watch 2 at all. Google recently confirmed to me that they have zero repair options for the Pixel Watch so this... hm. Hmmm, I say.