If you thought Facebook was creepy, you ain’t seen nothing yet
Google IO Google today opened its annual I/O developer bash with details of how it’s going to lob machine-learning software at everything you do online and offline, and it truly means everything.
CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage in Silicon Valley to explain how artificial intelligence will make life easier, safer, and more fun for everyone, provided they stay addicted to his company’s products. Not only will these AI systems simplify our lives, but they’ll also train us to use technology better.
“Technology can be a positive force but we can’t be wide eyed about its impact,” he told the crowd. “There are serious questions being raised and the path ahead needs to be calculated carefully. Our core mission is to make information more available and beneficial to society.”
To showcase this, he showed off some the augmentations that are coming to Google Assistant in the next few months, not least in the voice it uses. By the end of the year, when you chat with Google’s digital personal assistant, it will use one of six voices, including that of the singer John Legend, that you can select. Pichai said the use of AI meant the voice actors spent a lot less time in the studio: the ad giant’s code was able to learn enough from their utterances to impersonate the speakers with a wide vocabulary. Perhaps one day, it will impersonate you.
Google will soon add a feature to the assistant called Duplex. This takes natural language processing capabilities to the next level, and lets the assistant talk to humans on your behalf without revealing itself to be a bot. The software pretends to be you, or act for you, over the phone to automatically order food, arrange appointments, and so on. Rather than pick up the phone, dial someone, and go through that bothersome tediousness of interacting with them, no, instead ask Google to do it for you. And its digital assistant will.
The examples Pichai gave were of a netizen asking the assistant to book a haircut or a table at a restaurant. The software would then call the venue itself to make the booking, and it even adds in few verbal ticks, such as saying “er” or “mmhm”, to make itself more realistic. You can see it in action below:
While Google understandably thinks this is great, several folks at the event were a little creeped or worried by the Duplex system. One can only imagine what robo-callers are going to do with it. The tech isn’t available to the general public, yet.
The AI capabilities will also allow the assistant to respond without saying “Hey Google” to activate it. The assistant can now recognize when it is being talked to and react accordingly.
Some Googlers were also worried that kids talking to the assistant could get trained up to be rude little devils, so it will be introducing an opt-in system in the next few months called Pretty Please. If you ask the assistant something and use the word please it lavishes praise on you for being so polite.
Pichai also explained how Google’s News feature is being AI-augmented. The predictive systems that are going to be built in will automatically gauge the kind of news you want to see and suggest suitable “trusted” titles.
A new feature called Full Coverage will give all news content on a specific topic, and everyone will see the same data. But if you want a more general overview ther News app will suggest articles for you based on your past viewing habits, using around 1,000 trusted titles. How these titles get to be trusted, and who gets left out, wasn’t explained.
For those titles behind a paywall then the Chocolate Factory has inked a deal with publishers to allow people to subscribe and pay up using their Google account. Pichai said he hoped to expand the number of areas where subscriptions were managed by Google identity, which he promised would make life easier but which has the unsaid benefit for Google of getting its toe into a lot more of your life.
A similar approach is coming to Android P, the next build of Google’s mobile operating system that will be out in the autumn.
The P build will have better battery life, Dave Burke, the Android VP engineering promised because it will know how you use your phone. By logging which apps are used when OS will reduce the activity on lesser-used apps and Burke said this cuts battery-chewing CPU wakeups by 30 per cent.
“We believe smartphones should merge with you and adapt to you,” he said.
The new OS will also have a dashboard that shows all your activity during the day. This will not only help the phone understand how you work and on what, but will also predict and try and anticipate a users’ actions.
Android already has a line of the most commonly used apps on its main applications screen, but with the P build it will also suggest actions based on your past history. Burke showed off his phone telling him he usually called his wife or went for a run, and suggested these as possibilities. It’ll also suggest music if you have the headphones plugged in.
For developers these kinds of features can be added simply using an Actions.xml function, and Google is releasing the ML Kit as well. This opens up some basic AI functions like image and text recognition to everyone.
AI isn’t just about making you use technology more, but also when to put it away.
Android P will include an App Timer. This can be set up to warn users if they spend too long using a particular app and drop them a reminder to put the phone down and go and do something else instead.
Burke said that a common complaint was that people are too attached to the phone and the minute a notification comes in they have to look. So the new OS will have a Do Not Disturb function that not only kills the phone’s sound, but also any visual notifications and the mode is automatically enabled if you put a phone face down on a surface.
Of course, there will be exceptions. Users can set up a list of Starred Contacts – people who can always break through the Do Not Disturb settings. Spouses and children’s schools were suggested as just the ticket.
Another issue is people taking their phone to bed and staying up half the night using it. So Google has added a WInd Down mode to counter this.
If you tell the phone when you plan to go to bed it will set an internal counter going. Once bedtime comes the phone will mute out all color and put the phone in Do Not Disturb mode, along with a reminder to put it down and go to sleep.
Google Maps is also getting some important additions, thanks in part to the Google Lens image processing system and big data.
Maps will now be suggesting shops and services in a searched area based on your past habits. If you’ve rated somewhere highly in the past then this will factor into the decision and the app will tell you why it has recommended a particular place.
There’s also a group function – the idea being that if you are getting together with friends everyone can put in suggested restaurants and Google will help pick the most acceptable choice.
