Google on Wednesday announced that it was bringing its digital assistant to Apple Inc’s iPhones as part of its effort to win the battle with tech rivals on artificial intelligence.
At its annual developers conference at an outdoor concert-venue near its main campus in Mountain View, California, Google unveiled its vision for computing centered around artificial intelligence (AI).
“We are now witnessing a new shift in computing: the move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said during an opening presentation.
Photo: Bloomberg
“It is forcing us to reimagine our products for a world that allows a more natural, seamless way of interacting with technology,” he said.
For Google, those interactions include using artificial intelligence to let people engage computers conversationally, have software anticipate needs and let smartphone cameras “recognize” what they see.
Google Assistant, the center of its AI efforts, is in a fierce battle with rivals such as Amazon.com Inc’s Alexa, Microsoft Corp’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri to be the top choice for use in smartphones, as well as connected homes, cars and a range of other devices.
“Siri’s got company, and all these other guys are pretty serious about it,” Gartner Inc analyst Brian Blau said.
Artificial intelligence is being woven into Google’s free Gmail service, used by more than 1 billion people, for features such as suggesting responses to messages.
For example, opening an e-mail containing an invitation to dinner might trigger a prompt to reply “I’m in.”
Google machine vision capabilities are being used to enable services such as recognizing who is in pictures and what they are doing, as well as translate languages in signs viewed through smartphone cameras, demonstrations showed.
Advanced “Lens” features are being added first to the Google Photo application, which is available free.
Aiming a smartphone camera at a flower will prompt it to be identified, while aiming it at a complex password and hotspot name on a router will let it automatically log into the wireless connection.
Google also unveiled a second-generation computer chip it designed specifically to improve cloud
Introduced last year, Google Assistant, is now on more than 100 million devices, said Scott Huffman, the team’s vice president of engineering.
“We are really starting to crack the hard computer challenge of conversationality,” Huffman said.
“Soon, with Google Lens, your assistant will be able to have a conversation about what you see,” he said.
Google used the conference to announce a software kit that will let developers build Assistant capabilities into robots, applications and other computerized creations.
Developers cheered when talk turned to Google-backed mobile operating system Android.
Google announced that more than 2 billion devices powered by Android software are used monthly in a freshly passed milestone.
The coming version of Android, referred to simply as “O” for the time being, will also have boosted artificial-intelligence features along with enhanced security, executives showed.
Google is also crafting a lighter version of Android, referred to as “Go,” designed for maximum performance on low-cost, entry-level smartphones in developing countries where Internet bandwidth is lean or expensive.
Google said that while it is happy with the momentum of its Daydream virtual-reality platform based on using smartphone as screens in headsets, it is working with partners on stand-alone virtual reality gear.
Partners in the endeavor include Vive-maker HTC Corp (宏達電) and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), Google virtual reality team vice president Clay Bavor said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts