Systems of the future will be driven by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of today
A future driven by AI technology has just been outlined by the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, during his keynote address at Google IO 2017. Pichai stated “the more we democratise access to AI, the sooner everyone will benefit”. This vision was backed up by announcing a number of AI driven technologies including improvements to Google Home, Google Assistant and the all new Google Lens — an object recognition system that uses a smartphone camera and machine learning to interpret the world around you.
This is another major step toward a machine driven future — a movement that has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. AI isn’t a new technology and has been applied to plenty of digital systems for decades. Gaming has long been the dominant player in this space by constructing worlds full of artificial intelligence — from bots to birds to physics and every system in between. The entire construct of a game is an artificially created world full of computer driven systems. What we’re seeing now is this technology leak out into the real world and integrate with real life systems. The possible applications of AI technology in our mortal world is truly exciting.
The object recognition and image processing features of Google Lens that were announced today will be available in Google’s existing mobile Apps including Google Photos and Assistant — which is also launching on the iPhone today. This means we’ll start to see more AI driven systems in the world around us much sooner than anyone anticipated. Exactly which systems become part of this machine driven revolution will be dependent on the speed of adoption rather than the limitations of what’s possible with the technology.
As a digital agency we have already experienced some of the benefits that come with embracing AI technology. For example, customer relationship systems have benefited greatly with the addition of ChatBots as a way to both provide a more personal experience with the customer and consistently manage conversations.
Alphabet has been investing millions in the space of machine learning and artificial intelligence over the past few years. Through its subsidiaries, Alphabet has invested in research toward several applications of AI powered technologies including self driving cars, object recognition and voice translation. One could argue that Google has always been invested in AI by way of Google Search being able to interpret and catalogue the entire internet — it’s difficult to even think of the word Google without thinking about the colloquial meaning of searching for something on the internet. However, in 2016 Google brought a more tangible AI technology to the mass market with the release of the smart speaker and digital assistant Google Home. Now Google has set itself up to be a dedicated partner in the space of AI technologies by improving and expanding on an already strong set of products.
Improvements to Google Home, along with the new Google Lens, will allow the smart speaker assistant to “see” the world around you. This will make interactions less like describing the thousands of words of what you want and more like waving your phone around and being delighted with being immediately understood. Voice recognition will still be an integral part of the home assistant but vision is a welcome addition. And it’s also been announced that you will be able to see what the machine wants to show you via a link between the smart speaker and your television.
These new products and improvements deliver on a connected world — clearly taking note of the rapidly expanding internet of things. And Google has committed itself to continuing to help with this growth area too by announcing a new version of its TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU). These chips work together to process machine learning algorithms in the cloud faster than anything else on the market today — 64 unit can be clustered together to form 11.5 petaflops of computational power. Things connected to the internet will be able to leverage this supercomputer. So, expect to see even more things being taken over by a virtual assistant in the near future.
It may begin to seem like the stuff of science fiction — and you would be correct in that line of thought. However, the technology we have available to us now is going to take us to a place of robots, connected cities and frictionless technologies of the future. And thanks to Google, it’s going to happen much faster than you might think.
Anton Wintergerst, Mobile Developer
