Google revealed new products and made several announcements at the first day of the I/O developer conference on Tuesday. Besides technology upgrades, the feature that caught eye of the audience was “Duplex” that is part of the Google Assistant, a system that makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to answer questions and execute several tasks on voice commands. It competes in the market with Apple Inc.’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
The company demonstrated how Google Assistant can call enterprises to make appointments. A company official asked the system to make a hotel reservation and when a person on the other side picked up the call, the software discussed different things such as number of seats, timings and some other details.
The company said that it will soon roll out Duplex on trial basis. Duplex depends on AI, a kind of software that learns from data instead of coding.
Software maker giant Google has been working in AI field for more than a decade and is considered one of the dominant players in the artificial intelligence space. The company has started using AI in several products such as Smart Compose for Gmail that predicts the next words or sentences as users compose an email. Few years ago, it launched Smart Replies that suggested suitable replies to emails.
Google also launched version 3.0 of its Tensor Processor Unit that is a chipset developed for handling all the data-heavy AI tasks. The latest version is eight times more powerful than the previous version.
The company also made noticeable modifications in its Photos application including the ability of AI algorithms to recommend who to share photos with based on the subject in the snaps.
