Google Assistant will speak in four more languages this summer

Google Assistant is getting all the attention so far at the company’s annual I/O showcase. It can see, it can (finally) work on your iPhone, and starting this summer, Google Assistant will be able to detect and respond in French, German, Brazilian-Portuguese and Japanese. That’s not all. By the end of the year, after even more digital cramming, Assistant will also talk Italian, Spanish and Korean.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Google Assistant now accepts typed and verbal cues

Google Assistant is becoming more conversational with better AI, but what happens when you want to ask a question that you’d rather not say out loud? Today, Google added the ability to type into Google Assistant, making it easier to converse with the AI helper — even if you’re in a loud (or extra-quiet) environment. The ability to query Assistant with text has been part of Allo for a while, but this is the first time it’s been enabled directly in Google Assistant, which is also now on your iPhone.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Source: Google I/O

Google Assistant is about to be everywhere

Users will soon see Google’s AI Assistant in a number of new devices — including the Apple iPhone — the company announced at its I/O conference in Mountain View, California on Wednesday. Assistant debuted in 2016 and was originally integrated into the company’s Pixel phone and Home smart hub. It’s since spread to more than 100 million individual devices, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the crowd at this year’s conference, including smart TVs, automobiles and wearables. And it’s about to be in a lot more.

While Assistant already works with more than 70 smart home device makers, the company announced that it will soon release an Assistant SDK so that developers hardware manufacturers can integrate the service into even more devices — anything from speakers to blenders, smart locks to web cameras. “The new Google Assistant SDK easily allows a manufacturer to build the Google Assistant into any hardware,” Google’s Scott Huffman told the crowd.

Assistant will also boast a number of new features when it arrives on those devices. Google also announced on Wednesday that Assistant will speak four additional languages (French, German, Portuguese and Japanese) come summer and allow users to shop on third party websites without having to install separate apps or even open a new browser window.

developing

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

‘Actions on Google’ adds shopping via Assistant’s AI chat bot

We’ve seen AI-powered chat bots spread across different services, but Google is opening up a way for more companies to get in on the action. With “Actions on Google,” you can stay in your app (or talking to an Assistant-enabled device like Google Home) to do something like order food. On stage, the demo showed off ordering delivery from Panera, without needing to enter your home address or payment information, or even create a specialized account. This feature has been available since Google Home launched, but only worked with a limited number of services. Now that it supports transactions, it’s about to get a lot more useful.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Developing…

Google’s voice-controlled AI Assistant comes to the iPhone

You no longer need to install the Allo messaging app on your iPhone to shoot the breeze with Google’s AI Assistant. At the I/O keynote, Google’s Scott Huffman announced that the Assistant is truly coming to the iPhone today, as was rumored earlier this week. We’re not quite sure yet whether it’s getting its own app or will be integrated into the existing Google app, but the important thing here is you’ll be able to interact with the Assistant using your voice, whether that means asking it questions or controlling your smart home devices with conversational commands. Before now, you could only get limited Assistant functionality through Allo, which also required you to type queries and orders into the chat app.

With Amazon just starting to roll out its Alexa voice-controlled assistant to iOS as of last month, things are starting to look a little cramped in there for the poor old Siri.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Google Home is getting proactive assistance and visual responses

Google Home was a decent first stab at taking on Amazon’s Echo, but there’s clearly room for improvement. Today at Google I/O, the company revealed that its smart speaker will soon be able to give you proactive notifications, like alerting you to traffic delays ahead of upcoming appointments. Google Home will light up to let you know it has an alert for you, so it thankfully won’t just start talking without any prompting. Additionally, you’ll be soon be able to see visual responses to your Home queries on all of your devices. So, for example, if you ask for directions somewhere, you’ll get that routed straight to your phone.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Google Home gains Bluetooth connectivity to play audio from any device

Google’s smart speaker was already handy for a lot of things, but today the company is announcing a ton of new features for the device. At Google I/O 2017, the company said it’s adding Bluetooth connectivity to Google Home. This means you’ll be able to play music and other audio from any device, including those running Android and iOS.

Google also revealed that Spotify’s free tier will be available on Home. Previously, you needed a paid monthly subscription in order to beam your tunes to the speaker from that library. What’s more, support for SoundCloud and Deezer is on the way too, so you’ll soon have a few more options for streaming music. In terms of television, Netflix already plays nice with Google Home, but the company says soon the likes of HBO Now, CBS All Access and HGTV will also be available.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here.

Source: Google

Google launched a massive open AI division

Google CEO Sundar Pichai greeted the assembled press and developers with a news that the company would be focusing heavily on AI both for its services and research. The new Google.ai site and division will focus on artificial intelligence, deep learning and building the tools to make that work possbile.

To help accelerate AI research, Pichai announced that the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) it uses to train machine-learning models is available in the Google Cloud Platform for anyone to use via the Google Compute Engine today. “We want it to be possible for hundreds of thousands of developers to use machine learning,” Pichai said.

Our new Cloud TPUs accelerate a wide range of machine learning workloads, including training and inference https://t.co/aWvTVMn54Q #io17 pic.twitter.com/Bm5e8Gud6s

— Google (@Google) May 17, 2017

The CEO also announced that Google will be using the neural nets it creates to build other neural nets with AutoML. Pichai actually joked that this is like the movie Inception. The system takes a set of candidate neural nets (Pichai called them baby neural nets) and iterate them using a reinforcement training approach until the best one is found. The CEO said the results are promising. So Skynet isn’t happening just yet.

All of this work will be used in Google’s own products but also to help medical researchers. Pichai talked about using AI to help sequence DNA and helping pathologists locate things like the spread of cancer. It’s not completely perfect, “there are important caveats we do have higher false positives. But already giving this into the hands of pathologists they can improve diagnosis,” Pichai said.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here

Source: Google

Google Says There’s Now More Than 2 Billion Monthly Active Android Devices

Google today announced that there are now more than two billion monthly active Android devices in use around the world.

By comparison, Apple announced it had surpassed 1 billion active iOS devices in January 2016, but it hasn’t provided an updated count since then.

Apple sells tens of millions of iOS devices each quarter, so it’s reasonable to assume the total is above 1 billion, but likely well below 2 billion.

Android’s milestone was revealed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during today’s Google I/O keynote in Mountain View, California.

Tags: Android, Google I/O
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Blizzard VP Jeff Kaplan Says Company is ‘Open Minded’ About Bringing Overwatch to Mac

In a new Q&A video from Wired, Blizzard vice president Jeff Kaplan responded to a list of user questions on Twitter, all centered around the company’s popular first-person shooter Overwatch, which is currently available on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. Ahead of the game’s release, the company said that any development on Mac was not in the works and that focus would be on the other platforms.

Now, in response to a user asking if the game will ever be on Mac, Kaplan has said that Blizzard is “open minded” about bringing Overwatch to MacBooks and iMacs, although such development doesn’t appear to be a priority.

User’s question: Hi I was just wondering and I’m sure this question is kinda of annoying. Will Overwatch be coming to mac?

Kaplan’s answer: I will not say that it’s definite…that we will never be on Mac. We are open minded to it, we just need the priorities of our development process to line up with the capabilities of the platform in order for it to become a reality.

Kaplan’s response is a bit non-committal, neither confirming nor denying whether players will ever be able to purchase Overwatch for the Mac, but it is at least nice hearing that the team behind the game continues to consider all platform options moving forward. It remains unclear what specific Mac-related limitations might be preventing Blizzard from pushing forward in Mac development on Overwatch, but from Kaplan’s comments it appears that the team wants to ensure the game’s quality before it would publish it on Apple’s computers.

Blizzard has supported Apple devices for many of its previous games, including bringing Hearthstone to iOS and Mac, as well as launching Heroes of the Storm on Mac. Overwatch runs best with a consistent frame rate due to its fast-paced gameplay, particularly during competitive season games, but some lower-end PCs have been able to run the game with concessions in graphics and resolution.

The Mac-related question appears at 12:45 in Wired’s new video.

Tags: Blizzard, Overwatch
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