Application developers are the backbone of the modern cloud economy. The role of developers is felt in the seen and the unseen, from the smartphone apps we use every day to the network optimization that is powering a sustainable future. Given your importance in transforming so many fundamental aspects of society and industry, you’re facing more pressure than ever to remain innovative in the face of changing markets and industries. With limited time, shrinking budgets, increasingly complex environments, and compounding operational responsibilities, it’s no wonder that one of our most popular developer sessions last year at Next was focused on burnout.

Google remains a consistent advocate and ally of developers, from our ongoing contributions to open source projects like TensorFlow and Kubernetes to our free learning paths and certifications. The Application Developer spotlight session at Next ‘23 will lay out our aspiration to build a new way to cloud for developers. We favor “shifting down” instead of “shifting left,” to give you a cloud experience that is easy, fast, and secure.

An easy way to get started — with a trial at no charge for new users

Whether you’re just starting to create a new application, or laying the groundwork for your burgeoning developer career, navigating a new platform and its services can pose formidable challenges. Key details, like the more suitable Google Cloud service for running a dynamic website or estimating the cost of an application, may seem elusive. Moreover, as you transition from design to execution, it’s crucial to understand functional aspects like which APIs should be enabled or the IAM roles necessary for managing your services.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Jump Start Solutions to streamline your introduction to Google Cloud. These application and infrastructure solutions shift many of the tasks at the initial learning and researching phase down to the platform. Jump Start Solutions adhere to best practice principles and can be launched with a single click. Plus, new Google Cloud customers can take advantage of the $300 credit sign up trial. Whether you’re looking to explore, learn, or find a launching pad for creating production-ready applications, Jump Start Solutions are an easy starting point. Each solution comes with an estimated cost, comprehensive reference architecture, and tutorials.

The Generative AI document summarization solution in the Google Cloud Console

Some of our 14 solutions available today include a generative AI-powered document summarization app and an AI-powered image processing app. These are just the beginning of a wide range of solutions which help you lay a secure and stable foundation from which to build, innovate, and grow.  

Speeding up your development with AI and automation 

Imagine training a generative AI model using the best practices, documentation, and architecture guidance of Google Cloud and applying that to your coding experience. No longer will you have to leave your IDE to research how to complete a coding task, no more repeating low-value manual tasks, and no more hunting for expert guidance.    

Duet AI is now in preview across many services in Google Cloud to help shift the burden of researching, coding, and testing, down to the platform. A few of the ways developers can use Duet AI include:

• Code Completion and Code generation in your IDEs. You get recommendations as you type for full functions and code blocks based on comments, fixes for errors found in the code, and generation of unit tests for code directly in your IDE.
• Chat assistance so you can use natural language to ask questions about code bases and APIs, and retrieve coding best practices. Chat assistance is available across many Google Cloud products, such as in the Cloud Console, Cloud Workstations, BigQuery, Spanner, and Apigee.

Duet AI in Google Cloud supports 20+ programming languages such Go, Java, Javascript, Python, and SQL. Thanks to Cloud Code, you can use Duet AI with many popular IDEs such as VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, and Webstorm. And, with Duet AI’s source citations, suggestions provided by Duet AI are automatically flagged when directly quoting at length from a source to help you comply with any license requirements.

Enterprise companies like Wayfair who are committed to enhancing developer productivity are already using Duet AI, and are excited about how it makes life easier for their developers.

“At Wayfair, developer productivity is top of mind for us. We are excited to incorporate Duet AI in our efforts to have developers across Wayfair build applications incredibly fast! With Duet AI, we can increase developer productivity, and joy at the same time.” – Mark Quigley, Director of Engineering Enablement, Wayfair

Shifting down interoperability

Modern application development stacks are a mosaic of in-house creativity and essential third-party applications such as CRM, ERP, or payment systems. What is the lifeblood linking these siloed pieces? Integration. Building integrations demands time-consuming development work, niche skills, and deep understanding of third party systems like SAP or Salesforce. These compounding complexities can delay delivery and increase budget costs. We envision a world where platforms shoulder the burden of integration, liberating developers to innovate with their regained time. 

Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Application Integration – a no-code integration platform as a service (iPaaS) designed to empower you to weave together your applications. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface transforms the complex task of integration into a simple point-and-click journey. With 75+ pre-built connectors you can link Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage with third-party applications like Salesforce, MongoDB, Oracle, and SAP.

Building an integration flow using connectors, visual designer, and automated triggers

Further, Duet AI in Application Integration can shift even more work away from you and onto the platform. Using natural language, you can generate a recommended list of integration flows. Because Duet AI pulls context from your environment, it generates flows using your existing APIs and assets. To further harden your integration flows, Duet AI automatically generates documentation and test cases in a single click.

Using Duet AI to build integration flows, documentation, and tests with natural language

Secure, platform-driven application development 

With the world’s attention on how AI will shape the future, the challenges created by distributed workforces continue to be felt. Developer teams need help with onboarding, access to consistent tools and libraries, and development environments powerful enough for today’s workloads.

We recently announced the general availability of Cloud Workstations, powerful, secure and customizable development environments available anywhere, using a browser, local IDE, or terminal. Cloud Workstations can shift the burden of provisioning, scaling, managing and securing developer environments down to the platform. And like many other services across Google Cloud, you can use Duet AI in Cloud Workstations to help make you more efficient with everything from writing code to implementing best practices.

While the reality of geographically dispersed and rapidly growing development teams highlights the need to address traditional concerns, such as platform and data security, even greater scrutiny is placed on the software supply chain.    

An expanded partnership with GitLab for secure DevOps

Google Cloud continues to grow at a fast pace and that means we are constantly welcoming many new developers to our platform. We know the tools you choose for software development are an important factor in your success. We want to make it easy to use the tools you love. Today we announced that Google Cloud and GitLab are partnering to offer a secure DevOps solution that can shift the work to connect our technologies down to the platform while giving you integrated source management, artifact management, CI/CD, and enhanced security features. 

Developers already using Google Cloud gain access to GitLab’s comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform and GitLab customers gain access to Google Cloud’s Secure Software Supply Chain technologies like Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA), software bill of materials (SBOM), and Binary Authorization policies.

We can help you gain value from Google Cloud faster with deeply integrated partner tooling. That’s exactly what we are doing with our expanded GitLab partnership. Learn more on GitLab’s blog. You can also sign up to stay informed about the latest partnership developments.

Start shifting down with Google Cloud

At the heart of Google Cloud is a simple, yet powerful idea: to empower you to do what you excel at — coding exceptional software. In the fast-paced era of digital transformation, we understand the mounting pressures that developers face, which is why we believe it’s the responsibility of platforms to shoulder the burdens hindering your creative process. We’re helping you by streamlining your onboarding experience, optimizing your coding efficiency, and shifting the weight of security from you to the platform. We’re not alone in this journey; we’re collaborating with partners like Gitlab at our side. So if you’re an application developer, check out Google Cloud. It’s the new way to cloud on the cloud platform that’s designed to make your life easier.

Contact Center AI (CCAI) brings Google’s innovation in conversational AI to solve the most challenging customer service needs while lowering operational costs. More than a thousand customers have deployed CCAI and are steadily turning it on to power their production contact centers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve made CCAI even stronger with Agent Assist for Chat, now in public preview.

Agent Assist provides your human agents with continuous support during their calls and now chats by identifying the customers’ intent and providing them with real-time recommendations such as articles and FAQs as well as responses to customer messages to more effectively resolve the conversation.

Customers using Agent Assist for Chat have been able to manage up to 28% more conversations concurrently, while also driving up customer satisfaction by 10%. Additionally, we’ve seen them respond up to 15% faster to chats, reducing chat abandonment rates and solving more customer problems.

Agent Assist provides two key components to help agents manage conversations better: 

• Smart Reply provides response suggestions to agents so they can quickly and appropriately respond to customer messages. These suggestions can be taken from your top performing agents as well as modified even further to ensure suggestions properly reflect the tone and voice of your brand. Agent Assist learns when and what recommendations to make by building a custom model that’s trained on your (and only your) data.
• Knowledge Assist unlocks the power of your knowledge base to provide articles and FAQ suggestions to agents in real-time as the conversation progresses. When using Knowledge Assist, agents no longer need to make the customer wait while they navigate multiple applications and data to find the resolution to the customer’s issue — the answer is delivered right to them.  

“We’ve been very impressed by the chat capabilities of Agent Assist,” said Chris Smith, Vice President of Digital Service at Optus, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Australia

Optus has been using CCAI Dialogflow CX to send queries to virtual agents and sees great potential to use Agent Assist to provide recommendations to their customer support representatives. They expect Agent Assist to help minimize repetitive tasks by providing response and typeahead suggestions, helping improve the efficiency of their agents and the quality and consistency of service they provide.

Another customer, LoveHolidays, is using Agent Assist to support their agents and customers in the travel industry. 

“Agent Assist has been a beneficial aid to agents and our customers alike… It gives us the power to flex our contact center staff levels in hours not weeks,” said Eugene Neale, Director of CX Engineering & Business IT at LoveHolidays

Analysts say online chat is becoming one of the most popular ways to reach out to businesses for customer support. IDC research finds that single-function contact centers worldwide are increasingly rare — in 2020, although phone/voice is still responsible for most interactions (at around 18%); email is responsible for around 13% of interactions, and live chat (without automation) is responsible for around 8% of interactions, according to IDC, Toward the AI-Powered Contact Center, Doc # EUR147017320, December 2020.

Deploying CCAI with Agent Assist for Chat

As part of Google’s Contact Center AI suite, Agent Assist provides a seamless handoff from chats managed by your Dialogflow CX virtual agents. If a conversation or customer requires a live agent, Agent Assist will help your team pick it up quickly and drive it to a satisfying resolution. 

Historically, when managers saw contact center volumes increase they had two choices: allow customers to wait longer to speak to someone (lowering customer satisfaction) or bring on more agents (increasing cost to serve).  Deploying CCAI provides contact center leaders with a third choice: equip agents with tools like, Agent Assist for Chat, to efficiently manage customer interactions while maintaining high quality service.

Global CCAI partners support Agent Assist for Chat

Agent Assist for Chat is a set of public APIs that your engineering team can integrate directly into an agent desktop to control the agent experience from end-to-end. For a more out-of-the-box solution, we have partnered with LivePerson and 247.ai to build Agent Assist directly into their agent desktops.

“Integrating our Conversational Cloud directly with Agent Assist means agents can leverage cutting-edge productivity AI to build even further on the massive ROI of conversational commerce, from reduced agent effort and time-to-respond to increased customer satisfaction and revenue,” said Alex Spinelli, CTO of LivePerson. 

More Agent Assist resources

To learn more, check out the Agent Assist webpage. Give Agent Assist a try by training a model and then testing it using the Agent Assist simulator.

Over the decades, technology has helped us organize large amounts of physical information in ways that are streamlined, efficient, and easily accessible. Rows upon rows of encyclopedias are no longer needed; simply punch in or speak a query into Google Search and find numerous results at your fingertips. There’s no need to haul around cases of CDs or cassettes either, when you can access hundreds of thousands of songs on music streaming services. 

We wanted to bring that same level of accessibility to one specific type of publication: the printed car manual. Here’s how we shifted the paper manual to become an easy-to-access, voice-activated digital experience for owners of the all-new Sienna. It’s helped this resource become just as modern and useful as Toyotas themselves.

Putting cloud technology in the driver’s seat

Far too often, the printed car manual remains unused, collecting dust in the glove compartment—that is, until it’s needed during a roadside emergency or to solve the meaning of a mysterious light popping up on the dashboard. Even then, thumbing through hundreds of pages during high-stakes moments can be stressful. On top of that, these manuals can be expensive to print and update.

Digital versions, such as a PDF file, are a nice start. But, they’re often little more than reformatted flat documents. In poor visual conditions on the side of a road, the last thing a driver wants to do is squint at a phone or scroll through pages of tiny text. And similar to printed manuals, digital versions don’t facilitate ongoing, real-time conversations between drivers and automakers when it matters the most; they’re often only text and pictures, and at best, schematic drawings.

With that in mind, we set out to elevate and personalize the car manual by creating a voice-activated digital owner’s manual experience, all powered by Google Cloud. A voice-based assistant was the clear choice because, as it felt like the most intuitive, natural option, especially while driving. In fact, 51% of U.S. adults have used a voice assistant while driving, and 95% of all drivers expect to use a voice assistant in the next three years. 

We’re now putting this technology on the road by powering the Toyota Driver’s Companion for the all-new 2021 Toyota Sienna model. Accessible through the existing Toyota app, this companion provides real-time assistance, any time of the day. Drivers can ask questions and the companion will efficiently provide helpful answers in convenient ways, from voice to 3D walkthroughs and explorable environments. 

What a modern car manual should do

The Toyota Driver’s Companion has interactive features to help drivers discover the Sienna’s dashboard, set up the car’s interior and exterior appearance, better understand vehicle maintenance, and explore Dynamic Radar Cruise Control, Lane Departure Alert and other features. 

Here are a few other additional key features to call out within the Toyota Driver’s Companion: 

• An easily accessible virtual voice through the Toyota Driver’s Companion lets app users ask personal questions about their 2021 Sienna such as “what’s the height of my car?” and receive immediate answers either by voice, display or interactive input. 
• The manual automatically connects with the purchased vehicle’s VIN number to create a completely personalized experience, curated specifically for the driver. For example, if an unfamiliar light on the dashboard pops up, the Toyota Driver’s Companion can help identify the light’s meaning.
• Interactive hotspots throughout the vehicle’s interior let drivers explore the cabin virtually. Drivers can discover button functionalities, find specific dials, and learn more about car functions, such as how to slide seats or open doors, to become acclimated with their new vehicle.

To bring this experience to life, we tapped into some of our key Google Cloud solutions:

• APIs powered by Google Cloud artificial intelligence technology make accessing specific vehicle information easy and effortless, by leveraging Google’s natural language processing:
  • Google Cloud DialogFlow API serves as the decision tree that gives intelligence for both finding an answer for a question, i.e., how the Companion responds to the end user’s questions. 
  • One of our Text-to-Speech APIs—called Wavenet—creates the Companion’s realistic voice. 
  • And finally, our Speech-to-Text API “listens” to the user’s voice and finds the correct information to craft responses. That means a driver can ask a question multiple ways, and the Companion will still respond with the right answer. 

Our Firebase mobile app dev platform gleans analytic insights that help improve the overall experience and services for OEMs and drivers alike.https://www.youtube.com/embed/66QxWS-PzIM?enablejsapi=1&

We’re encouraging better consumer experiences by providing faster access to fresh information, in a natural, accessible format—voice. But these new voice-activated experiences aren’t only an opportunity to help out drivers; it’s also about strengthening connections between drivers, their vehicles, and automakers, too. 

Our hope is that through this information exchange, drivers can provide feedback on the most frequently misunderstood features, enabling OEMs to address questions early on. By understanding the most requested features, OEMs can also predict and inform driver questions about features. We’re incredibly excited to help make the driver’s experience more connected and helpful.

In the past few years, a series of new technologies and regulatory changes has been transforming Brazil’s financial industry. The concept of blockchain added security and agility to financial transactions. The open banking system being deployed by the country’s Central Bank (BC) allows for platform integration and data sharing -with the user’s consent- between financial institutions. Recently, the launch of Pix, also by the BC, has shaken the market by creating a new payment method that is instant, free for individuals and 24/7.

Since 2018, the startup Bit Capital has been working on the development of 100%-digital financial solutions in the cloud to help its clients adapt to this new scenario in a convenient way, without the need to build an infrastructure for that or hiring different providers. Pix was not the exception.

In less than 3 months, the team was able to build and go live with a solution that can be used by both direct participants (i.e. those with banking licenses granted by BC) and indirect participants (i.e. companies depending on direct participants to offer payments on Pix) through Bit Capital’s platform.

Besides this differential, Pix and the startup’s other solutions are based on blockchain and Google Cloud’s cloud, ensuring greater security, scalability and availability for customers and allowing for an easy integration between Bit Capital’s platform’s solutions and those from other companies.

“Now we have a platform with an API and various microsservices, allowing clients to connect and develop their own financial product without having to start from scratch.”

—Francesco Miolo, CFO, Bit Capital

A robust structure to handle Pix’s high demand

Bit Capital was established with a certain urgency to develop its platform. The idea was well-developed and customers were interested. The fast deployment of Google Cloud’s tools was one of the main factors that attracted the company to use it as a basis for its infrastructure.

“We managed to deliver everything we have today in Google Cloud with a small team. That was another challenge: being able to grow with a few people,” says Juliano Souza, the startup’s head of IT infrastructure. “We sought other cloud partners, but they had a steep curve. We chose Google Cloud because we needed quick, quality scaling.”

The same thing happened when they built the solution for Pix, despite the specific challenges involved. The BC had performance requirements that led the company to spend some time experimenting until they reached the best suite of tools to meet those requirements. The startup wanted to create a unique architecture that could help both large and small customers and be integrated to the platform’s other microservices.

With the support from Google Cloud’s team to answer doubts and make the best decisions, the solution was built in a few months, at a cost about two-thirds lower than other providers.

The solution’s architecture is based on apps running in Docker in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), with interconnected microservices. The blockchain system runs on Compute Engine, its rows are managed in Pub/Sub and Dataflow, and persistent data, in Cloud SQL. Cloud Interconnect is used for the connection with BC. Cloud KMS and Secrets Management store the company’s pre-credentials. All of this is supported by Cloud Load Balancing for load balancing and autoscaling.

According to the team, GKE was essential for the solution’s success. Using infrastructure as code in the tool made uploading of a group of microservices significantly easier. Developers are able to help set up this environment, which has helped spread the DevOps culture in the team. Besides orchestrating and integrating apps, GKE also provides an elastic structure to handle demand peaks and visibility to monitor internal components.

“Google Kubernetes Engine was the only way to ensure availability, observability and elasticity for all clients, whether small, middle-sized or large.”

—Juliano Souza, Head of IT Infrastructure, Bit Capital

Nowadays, the solution’s environment has 20 clusters with over 1,500 pods – 250GB in data per month, providing a robust structure to support a service involving periods of intense demand such as Black Friday.

Ease to monitor, fix and improve

Just 10 days after Pix’s official launch date, the company had its first test: Black Friday. This allowed a major e-commerce customer to test the scale and see the success of the architecture that had been built. “It worked great regarding what the cloud could deliver. And we found what we needed to fix very quickly. Operations [formerly Stackdriver], in particular Cloud Trace, showed us clearly what needed to be done to improve performance,” Souza explains.

Using Operations added reliability by putting deliveries into production. Checking Cloud Trace to see if there were any performance issues and the exact point where they were happening became routine for Bit Capital’s developers. Google Cloud’s security tools and Google Safety Center provided the resources needed to monitor and secure the environment, with automatic data encryption at rest and in transit.

“Google Cloud has security as a premise. When we upload any kind of component, like a database or a virtual machine, the drive is encrypted by default. With other providers, you must specify that you want it encrypted.

”—Juliano Souza, Head of IT Infrastructure, Bit Capital

The easy service monitoring and management accelerates product and technology development because the team no longer needs to worry about infrastructure. Automated management allows professionals to spend more time on new projects and the company’s business. Also, the deployment of services in a Google Cloud multi-region impacts on customer experience, providing high availability for their solutions.

In the coming months, Bit Capital aims to ramp up service usage and the creation of new projects in Google Cloud by adding more customers to Pix’s solution and Banking as a Service (BaaS) solutions. Anthos will be incorporated to the tool suite to make it easier to connect apps with the customers’ on-prem environments. And the deployment of open banking has the potential to be a business driver for the company.

“We joke that we’re already doing open banking, because we have various connections with different providers, which allows us to offer an integrated solution,” says Francesco Miolo, the startup’s CFO. “With the arrival of the new regulations, something we are waiting for since we started out, we will be able, through our platform, to take our customers to the open finance ecosystem, enabling the development of disruptive business models.”