Google IO Livestream: How to Watch and What to Expect

Google will host its tenth annual Google I/O beginning Tuesday at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. The developer conference will kick off with a May 8 keynote from Google CEO Sundar Pichai at 1 p.m. Eastern, and the event will continue through May 10.

Developers and tech fanatics from around the world will travel to Silicon Valley to hear about the company’s future plans for all of its products, from Android smartphones to Google Home. For those who can’t make it to California, Google will be providing a livestream of the event so everyone can check out what Google’s got in store for 2018.

How to Watch

All of the Google I/O keynotes and sessions will be streamed directly on the event’s website. Navigate to the upper left corner of the site to get a comprehensive hour-by-hour break down of all of the scheduled announcements.

For everyone that won’t be able to watch live, certain sessions will be uploaded to the Google Developers YouTube channel after they wrap up.

What to Expect

Android P: Google I/O is usually centered around the announcement of the company’s next-generation Android operating system. The ninth version of Google’s mobile OS, Android P, will succeed last year’s Google Oreo. This iteration has been teased to have a more visually-focused interface, much like the Apple’s iOS. In fact, there have been rumors that it will include some of the iPhone X’s gesture features, which would allow users to navigate their smartphones with a few simple swipes instead of using buttons.

Google Assistant and Google Home: There has been a big market boom for smart speakers and smart-home devices recently. Google Assistant and Google Home hardware are the company’s biggest competitors to the likes of Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri so expect to hear updates on this line of products. In a CES 2018 video from January, Google teased that its future speakers might include embedded screens. We’ll get a better glimpse of how these products might look like after Tuesday.

Android TV and Android Auto: There hasn’t been much news regarding Google’s home entertainment system Android TV or its car infotainment device, Android Auto, for quite some time. There has been speculation that a new 4K Android TV dongle will be announced this year, which could include a full TV interface and a remote. As for Android Auto, Google announced it would begin retrofitting it with voice functions at this year’s CES, so expect an update on those features and much more.