Google Showcases Al Advances At Its Big Conerfence

Google put the spotlight on its artificial intelligence smarts at its annual developers conference, where it announced new features and services imbued with machine learning.

The company’s digital concierge, known only as the Google Assistant, is gaining new — if experimental — abilities to handle tasks such as making restaurant reservations and placing other tedious phone calls without human hand-holding.

“Hi, I’m calling to book a hair appointment for a client,” said a realistic-sounding automated voice in a demo from the conference stage. The AI voice used pauses and “ums” and “mmm-hmms” to sound more human during interactions with people.

The company said it is rolling out the technology, called Google Duplex, as an experiment in coming weeks.

“We really want to work hard to get this right,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who kicked off the conference.

Gmail is getting new features such as an autocomplete feature that uses machine learning to offer suggested ways to finish sentences users start typing. For example, “I haven’t seen you” might be autocompleted to “I haven’t seen you in a while and I hope you’re doing well.” Users can accept the completion by hitting the tab key.

The Google Photos app should get smarter about suggesting who you might want to share photos with. Whenever it recognizes a photo of one of your Google contacts, it can suggest sharing that photo with that person. It will also convert photos to PDFs and automatically add color to black-and-white photos or make part of a color photo black and white. The changes are coming in the next two months.