Google I/O 2015 keynote live blog: As it happened

Thanks for tuning in and make sure to check out the links above to get all the detail on what Google has announced.

And that's it. No Google Glass, No Tango. No Ara. No Chromecast 2. No Nexus devices.....but still lots of interesting announcements.

Sounds like Sundar is wrapping up. If so, there will be a lot of people disappointed.

Google I/O keynote not been going on for almost 2.5 hours. Just in case you forgot....

Quickly onto Project Loon which is a project to help connect the next billion users using balloons which deliver LTE data networks with 4x the area coverage

Pichai back on stage and we're onto driverless cars. Last year there was 33,000 deaths on the US roads. Google things technology can help. One million miles now clocked up by Google's Lexus fleet. Not a single crash caused by those cars.

But where will be able to watch this content? Hushed silence as the audience awaits announcement of Google's very own Oculus Rift.....no, it's available on YouTube. Oh well.

Google Jump - a platform to allow anyone to create VR content using a 16-camera array.

GoPro will launch a Jump-ready 360 degree camera array. Here it is.

Google Cardboard is great and all, but it's hardly Oculus Rift or HoloLens

Now onto Google VR for eduction. Expeditions lets teachers take their classes to field trips anywhere in the world.

Expeditions comes as a box with Google Cardboard and phones for all the students along with a tablet for teachers. Now seeing a video featuring students using it.

Google Cardboard 2.0 announced to fit phones with screen as large as 6in and with magnet button replaced with a cardboard button. Takes just three steps to assemble. On sale today.

Cardboard SDK now supports iOS as well as Android.

One million Google Cardboard units in use around the world

Someone proposed to his girlfriend using Google Cardboard. How does that work?

Google Cardboard was launched last year as a basic VR viewer....and has turned into an entire eco-system apparently.

Finally, here come the VR

Pichai is back to announce the Android Nanodegree, a $200-a-month six-month course that will make you an Android developer.

Google introducing the Family Star to help parents find family-friendly content allowing you browse by age, with filtered search results only showing apps and games. Popular Characters will let you search by certain characters - Dora the Explorer, Peppa Pig etc.

Google has seen 50 billion app installs from Play in the last 12 months. That's a lot of apps.

Google Play now using one billion users every single day. Growing twice as quickly in markets like India compared to developed markets.

Just a running list of things not touched on so far

• Google Glass
• Chromecast 2
• "A wearable that will blow your socks off"
• Project Ara
• Project Tango
• VR
• Robots
• Space rockets

Google is making it easier for developers without dedicated marketing teams to promote their apps, as well as giving each Android developer their own page to promote their services and apps.

Google now talking about new developer tools and features

Offline Google Maps is something people have been asking for, for a long time, but it is unclear if everyone will have access to them or if it will be limited to developing markets

It is unclear if offline Maps will be limited to a certain area limit (20sq miles for example) or will be country wide. Either way, it is great.

Offline search and navigation on Google Maps is coming later in 2015..

Finally something new. A demo of offline Google Maps which supports turn-by-turn navigation....impressive.

Google will adapt how is renders webpages automatically depending on how fast your connection is.

So far this keynote has been pretty low key....

Google now talking about how it has optimised Chrome to load faster and use less data on slower 2G data. A feature rolled out in October last year...

Google talking about connecting the next billion smartphone users and playing up its Android One initiative

Thats it from photos. Now onto Google Translate with a video telling us the most translated words around the world every day are "how are you", "thank you" and "I love you".

Google will give everyone unlimited photo backup for images and video (1080p video 16 megapixel images). It is rolling out today for Android, iOS and the web.

Sharing is made easier by allowing you batch select with the swipe of your finger and sending a link without the need for the recipient to sign up or sign in

The Photos app looks great and Google is taking a lot of the work out of organising and sharing your images. The search giant is making the most of its powerful processing tech

You can use a text search to find the photos you want.

Tapping the search button sees your photos automatically organised by the people in them without the need to tag them manually.

Swiping right in the app brings you to Collections, where your albums and montages are stored.

Google automatically backs up your photos from your smartphone, PC, tablet and allows you to jump back in time easily and by pinching within the app, you can go from day view to month view to year view and back again.

Google Photos is an online home for all you photos. It helps you organise and makes it easy to share and save what matters.

This is a spin off of the photo section of Google+ which could be a death nail in the much maligned social network.

I am delighted to be here to introduce a new product. Google Photos.

The sheer volume of photos you now take, makes it impossible to relive the moments you really want to remember.

Now onto photos...

Now on Tap will roll out with Android M. It will allow you to quickly ask questions within apps. A tap and home on the Home button will automatically bring up details about a film you mention in your email.

"We are working on a new capability to assist you in the moment, right when you need it. We are calling it Now on Tap."

In a mobile world you get stuff done with apps. Google has started a pilot program with 100 developers to bring cards from apps into Google Now. Order an Uber when you land at the airport etc.

By the way, Aparna Chennapragada from Google Now is talking us through how the system works.

Google Now understand 100 million places around the world. Including details like when they are busy, when they are open

To assist users we need to understand context, bring answers proactively and finally help you get things done.

Your smartphone should be smarter...and that's why Google started on Google Now

Now talking about Google Now

Pichai now talking about deep neural nets and how it has helped the company do natural language processing. Dropped word rate has from 23% to 8% in just one year thanks to advancements in machine learning.

The final part is standardising the set-up process. Brillo developer preview will be available as a developer preview in Q3, Weave will be available in Q4 2015.

The second aspect of Google's push to create an Internet of Things platform is Weave, a standardised language to allow devices to talk to each other. It is cross-platform meaning you can use it on top of the app you already use, or integrate it with Brillo.

Pichai says it will allow you to make your oven voice-enabled.

Google announces Project Brillo, which is derived from Android but completely stripped back to allow it work on devices with tiny footprints like doorlocks. Because it is based on Android you get manufacture support, security has been built in from the ground up.

Pichai back on stage and he's talking about the Internet of Things, including the smart home, smart farm and smart city

And that's it from Android Wear, which is pretty disappointing considering we learned nothing new...

By the end of the year there will be many more Android Wear watches to choose from....

There are already more than 4,000 apps built specifically for Android Wear. "That's thousands of apps that do more than just tell the time." Well, yes.

Updates to Android Wear:

• Always on: let you keep apps or the time on the screen all the time. Google for
• Gestures: You can now flick between cards with a flick of your wrist
• Drawing emoji: You can now draw emoji and the system will automatically detect it and send the relevant character

However as many have pointed out. These updates have already been detailed a few weeks ago.

Here's the Android Wear timeline:

Now over 1,500 watch faces available for Android Wear. A little dig at the Apple Watch which has just 10

David Singleton, director of Android Wear now on stage to talk smartwatches

Android M Developer Preview coming to Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player today.

Google has been working with manufacturers to bring phones with USB-C connectors for faster charging and Google says we will be seeing phones with these reversible ports soon.

The final update with Android M is power. Phones running Android M will monitor motion and if phone hasn't moved in a long time will go into a deeper sleep - called dozing - which will kill almost all background apps. Google says it will give you 2x battery power in sleep mode.

With Android M, we are getting fingerprint support which will work with Android Pay to make payments simple. This is bringing Google up to speed with Apple's TouchID

Android Pay will work with phones which have NFC and are running Android KitKat or later. It will be rolled out in the US first with all major credit card companies and 700,000 retailers at launch.

And here, as we said earlier, is Android Pay

The next update will allow you directly link apps. It means that when you click on a Twitter link in Gmail for example, you will go to the Twitter app rather than the Twitter webpage - so long as Twitter has implemented this feature of course.

Here are the benefits for consumers of Custom Tabs according to Google:

Chrome Custom Tabs is the next feature of Android M being demonstrated. Allows app developers to seamlessly transition from apps to Chrome making the experience less jarring. Looks very nice.

You can now easily go into Settings and see which permissions each app has and also look at the permissions and see which apps have access to say the microphone, camera, your location or contacts. Again, something iOS already offers.

First up, App Permissions.

"Giving users meaningful control over permissions they need." Apps will now ask for permission the first time you use a feature, something iOS already does.

Interestingly iOS 9 is also set to be focusing on quality rather than big new features

Dave Burke, vice president of engineering now on stage to talk Android M which focuses on quality

And there it is, Android M Developer Preview

HBO Now coming to Google Play for the first time with support for Casting...

Update on the various Android platforms:

• Android on smartphones: 400 OEM, 500 carriers, and 5,000 devices
• Android Wear: Seven models now available
• Android Auto: Cars from Hyundai now selling with the software
• Android TV: Sony and Sharp TVs shipping in US, more coming
• Chromecast: 17 million devices, 20,000 apps support it

Google showing a visual representation of Android smartphones around the world with different coloured dots representing smartphone from high end devices like the Galaxy S6 to budget smartphones

Pichai taking about the reasons why Google built products like Gmail, Maps, YouTube and Chrome. Each of them now has over one billion users.

"This is the moment of mobile and the smartphone." Since last Google I/O 600 million people have begun to use a smartphone for the first time

Pichai now calling in to people watching the livestream around the world. A little bit Eurovision this....but without the satin pants.

Pichai has been called the most powerful man at Google

And here is Sundar Pichai, Google senior vice president of products...

The number seven keeps appearing....Will Android M be Android 7.0?

Now we have an animated film all about apps and coding....it's very Google

We're now getting a countdown...24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19....oh you get the idea

We're still travelling through space on Google's introductory video. We are currently just passing Mars...

By the way this is David back with you...

We've got a space theme from Google at the beginning of the keynote....are we about to see a Google Rocket?

And we're off....

I, for one, welcome our really tall selfie stick overlords

Two minutes to go now, so grab some sugary sweets, take a seat and mute your phone.

Oh, and mission complete - I found a guy wearing Google Glass.

...and now Google wows the crowds with a massive blue whale

Google now showing a video which resembles that old Honda advert, 'Cog'

Strong panorama game here - and that is a massive screen. Just 20 minutes to go...

More seriously, payments are going to be the big theme of today. Payments from phones, from smartwatches, probably from tablets too. But will whatever Google has up its sleeve be available outside the US at launch? We have our doubts...

Shall we have a sweepstake on how many times Google Glass will be mentioned? And how many members of the audience are wearing it?

Unlucky if you have to spend the 2.5 hour conference sat behind this guy

Ah yes, that pose all journalists are familiar with - staring down at your laptop/tablet/phone/thumbs and completely ignoring the press conference in front of you.

So what about that "wearable that will blow your socks off"? Well surely we'll see some major updates to Android Wear - but will this mean new software for all of Google's partners, or will we see an all-new smartwatch made by Google itself?

It's Alistair Charlton here for a few minutes while David finds you some more Google Play pub quiz questions.

While Google is holding its annual conference in San Francisco, just down the road in Las Angeles the company's former head of Android Hugo Barra is taking the stage at CodeCon. Barra is now in charge of the global expansion of Xiaomi, which announced today that it will officially launch UK and US online stores from next week.

OK, the answer is.....Japan, followed by the United States, South Korea, Germany and the UK.

Can you guess the top five countries by revenue on Google Play?

I'll give you a minute...

Just an hour to kick off an journalist have already been shown to their seats inside the Moscone Center in San Francisco...now that's organisation

Just going back to the Android Pay hint we saw earlier, mobile payments are clearly going to be a very big deal if figures from eMarketer are anything to go by:

Google has always used its annual developer conference to announce new Nexus hardware alongside the next version of Android, but a complete lack of leaks in the build up to this year's conference suggests that either Google has got very good at secrecy, very quickly.....or there will be no new Nexus device on show today.

Let's hope for the former...

Android is clearly going to be a very important part of Google's keynote this afternoon, and ahead of the conference, Carolina Milanesi has had a look at the state of the platform and had this to say about Android Wear in particular:

With wearables starting to pick up momentum, the ecosystem will prove critical in retaining customers and possibly even winning them over. Back in November and before we had full details on the Apple Watch, we asked British smartphone owners who intend to buy a wearable device in the next 12 months if they were ready to switch their smartphone OS, and 44% of Android owners said they were NOT ready, versus 48% of iOS owners - showing that the game is certainly on.

Google started to take some steps last year to address the quality of apps for tablets, security within the enterprise, content consumption, and sharing. It will certainly be interesting to see what else will be addressed during this year's developer conference.

The first leak of the afternoon comes from....Google. Kantar WorldPanel ComTech's chief mobile analyst Carolina Milanesi points out that it looks like Android Pay is going to be one of the big announcements today

Good afternoon everyone, David Gilbert here for the next four hours to guide you through the announcements Google will make at its annual developer conference in downtown San Francisco.

We'll be discussing what to expect in more detail over the coming hours, ahead of the keynote kicking off at 9.30am local time which is 5.30pm in the UK. For now, have a look at our preview and details on how to watch the livestream of the event online: