Artificial intelligence: the lifeblood driving Google's new wave of devices

At the MadeByGoogle event that happened in San Francisco yesterday, Google took the wraps of a flurry of consumer gear, all aimed solely at surrounding users with the might of their search prowess.

Search: it’s the one thing that has pretty much defined Google. Despite the universe of other products and services that the company has spawned over their 18 years of existence, that ubiquitous text box beneath the Google logo in the center of the stark white web page has grown to define the web experience of billions--an understated yet unmistakable invitation to ask. Which explains why this concerted move to extend ‘search’ further into people’s pockets, kitchens, living rooms and pretty much everywhere they live, seems like a natural progression for the company.

While the company has been known for pretty much re-writing the book on areas like user interface and user experience--with simplicity and function at the core--there is immense amount of complexity behind their online experiences and products.

Take search, for example--it is powered by a globally-distributed infrastructure of server farms, terabit-speed network connections, and bleeding-edge software driven by the advanced science of deep neural networks and natural language processing to interpret raw data in ways that are startlingly human. If you’ve received a notification on your Android phone that suggests that you leave earlier for a flight owing to unexpected traffic en route, you’ve known the feeling.

While the new Pixel phones, Google Home, the Chromecast Utra, the Google WiFi router and Daydream View will undoubtedly stoke fans for months to come, it isn’t really about the hardware. It’s about the intelligence that’s driving it all--their cloud-based Google Assistant.

When it debuted at their I/O event in May this year, this service seemed like an evolution of their ubiquitous ‘Ok Google’ voice recognition functionality that’s already available on millions of Android phones. But this piece of smart software appears to be built to do more, to be the vanguard of Google’s charge in to imparting more human-like responses, context and conversation into their new generation of smart devices.

Google Assistant is going to be baked right into the two new Pixel phones--it is invoked by simply holding down the home button and asking a question, and the answer pops up right there. This smart AI service also serves as the foundation of their new Allo messaging app, designed to leverage their Artificial Intelligence and search capabilities to offer real-time suggestions and answers right within a chat environment.

With the new Google Home--a device that resembles a Bluetooth speaker--the aim is to put voice up front and center of the daily experience. The only way to communicate with it is by ‘waking’ it up with an “Ok Google”, then asking it pretty much any type of question. From the innocuous “What’s the weather like today”, to being able to follow through with several related queries around the topic, the device leverages Google Assistant to interpret questions, ferret information from trusted sources on the Web, and respond to the user using concise, natural speech.

Consider for a moment the AI at work here: a question like “Play me that song from Dirty Dancing” would result in an elegant one-line acknowledgement followed by just one song--the title track--being played. That’s almost human-level intelligence at work: deciphering that Dirty Dancing is a movie without being explicitly told so, locating all the online sources that host its songs, determining which of these songs is the most popular, and finally playing just that one. And all of this happening in near real time.

Multiple such devices can also be deployed across a home, where they communicate with each other to seamlessly determine which device is nearest to the person speaking, and having just that one respond with information.

Also announced is a new WiFi router that aims to add a few smarts into the home wireless setup. With robust WiFi being the foundation of all this connected home of the near future, this router was shown to communicate with other multiple Google WiFi routers to automatically modulate strength of the wireless mesh network to provide the best overall coverage--and bandwidth--to connected devices.

It is intriguing to consider the possibilities of this new wave of devices, backed by an ever-learning, always available and continuously evolving AI engine. Assuming of course that all of this works as advertised. When breaking through technology frontiers, it’s always a question of whether a hot new capability eventually turns out to be just a gimmick, or something that would rock a user’s world.

Either way, connected AI systems are here, and they’re here to stay--this is but the first of an impending wave.