Google has gone all out and rebranded the whole of its ‘Google Research’ division to ‘Google AI’ as it pushes developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
This big change was announced in a blog post ahead of the Google I/O Developer’s conference and demonstrates just how serious the company is in regards to AI factors including computer vision, deep learning, and speech recognition. In the same post, Google said that it has been implementing machine learning into almost everything that it does over the past few years.
As part of this rebrand, the company has also changed the homepage for Google AI so that it features published research on varying subject matters, stories of AI, and a range of tools and resources that users can use.
In what many people would consider to be a nudge toward the Singularity, those at the I/O Developer’s conference saw a demo of an incredibly natural sounding Google Assistant that was able to make an appointment over the phone. This feature is something the company is calling Google Duplex – a virtual assistant that was able to speak to a human working in a hair salon without any issue.
This is bananas. Google Assistant just called to book a haircut for someone. #io18 pic.twitter.com/gr2V0NjfiH
— Daniel Bader (@journeydan) May 8, 2018
It was almost impossible to tell the Google Assistant from the human salon worker, demonstrating just how blurred the lines between human and AI have become. The assistant’s intonation was perfect, with the machine throwing in some natural “umm”s and “hmmm”s before it answered.
It’ll still be a while before we can benefit from this technology, with CEO Sundar Pichai announcing that the technology is still in development but it would be rolled out to a limited number of testers as part of an “experiment in the coming weeks.”
Further impressive AI features to be announced at the conference included a Smart Compose feature that can write emails for you and the ability to colorize black and white photos using advanced object recognition.