July 2019 Summaries

The Women Techmakers Summit Europe, held in Warsaw in 2019, brought together 120 community organizers and influencers from diverse tech communities across Europe to foster diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. The event featured sessions led by community influencers, role models, and Google representatives, who shared personal stories and best practices aimed at encouraging participants to explore new opportunities and overcome the fear of failure. Attendees were inspired by insights from notable figures such as Natalie Villalobos and Emma Haruka Iwao, who emphasized resilience and innovation. The summit emphasized the importance of creating inclusive environments and provided a code of conduct, prayer spaces, and family-friendly facilities to ensure all attendees felt welcome. The Women Techmakers program, supported by over 150 ambassadors across 25 countries in Europe, aims to close the gender gap in tech by empowering local community leaders with the tools and opportunities to advocate for gender parity in the industry.

In 2019, Women Techmakers celebrated International Women's Day by hosting its sixth annual summit series, which included 19 summits and 305 meetups across 87 countries, aiming to support and recognize women in the tech industry. Partnering with the Actions on Google team, the events featured technical workshops where attendees learned to develop Actions for the Google Assistant, gaining hands-on experience with building conversational interactions using Dialogflow as a natural language processor. Participants engaged in Codelab sessions where they implemented features such as deep linking, personalized responses, and rich media interactions. The initiative highlighted the importance of voice applications in modern technology and fostered a sense of community and learning among women in tech.

Google has launched the Local Home SDK as a developer preview, designed to enhance smart home integrations by allowing developers to create a local execution path for smart devices connected to Google Assistant. This SDK, which has been tested with partners like GE, LIFX, and Philips Hue, enables JavaScript-based business logic execution on Google Home smart speakers and Nest smart displays, offering reduced latency and increased reliability compared to cloud-based operations. The SDK introduces two new intents, IDENTIFY and REACHABLE_DEVICES, which help identify and manage devices on a user's home network. By facilitating local execution, users benefit from faster request fulfillment, while the system retains cloud-based redundancy to ensure reliability. The platform supports all Wi-Fi-enabled devices and allows developers to test and configure apps easily through the Actions console, integrating smoothly with the existing smart home framework for self-certification and debugging.