By Jack Nicas
Google doubled down on its bet on artificial intelligence with
new features and availability for its virtual assistant and smart
speaker at its annual software-developers conference, part of a
scramble with other tech giants to dominate the next wave of
consumer technology.
The new uses unveiled Wednesday touch on such popular Google
functions as photos, email and mobile payments. They build on two
products -- Google Assistant and Google Home -- announced at last
year's conference. But there was also a nod to a new computing
platform: virtual reality.
Tech is in the middle of "this important shift from a
mobile-first to an AI-first world and we are driving it forward
across all of our products and platforms," Google Chief Executive
Sundar Pichai said at the conference in the company's hometown of
Mountain View, Calif.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., is trying to make its services
even more ubiquitous by plugging the Google Assistant, its
competitor of Apple Inc.'s Siri and Amazon.com Inc.'s Alexa virtual
assistants, into far more devices. Google said the Assistant will
soon be available via an app on iPhones -- following a similar move
by Amazon -- as well as a variety of other devices, including
refrigerators, washing machines and toys.
Google also said it would soon add phone-call capabilities to
its Google Home smart speakers. Users can call any phone number in
the U.S. or Canada with the service, an advantage over a new
Amazon.com Inc. smart speaker called the Echo Show that allows
users to video chat only with other Echo Show devices or phones
that have the associated app.
"I thought the Echo Show was good but this is even better," said
Werner Goertz, Gartner's research director for personal technology.
"The Echo can call Amazon fanatics, but with this you can call your
mom, who may be tech agnostic."
Still, the Google Home already trails Amazon's Echo by a wide
margin. Market research firm eMarketer estimated in May that Echo
controls 70% of the smart-speaker market versus 24% for Google
Home.
The pie is growing, though. EMarketer forecasts 35.6 million
people in the U.S. will use a smart speaker this year, up 129% from
2016.
The use of virtual assistants, predominantly on smartphones, is
far higher. EMarketer forecasts a 23% increase this year in the
number of U.S. virtual-assistant users to 60.5 million, or about
27.5% of U.S. smartphone users. The market share of the various
virtual assistants -- the Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's
Siri and Microsoft's Cortana -- is unclear.
Google showed its enormous reach with some new statistics
Wednesday, including there are now two billion active devices
running its Android software, up from 1.4 billion in late 2015.
Google also suggested it could soon add to its list of seven
products that have more than one billion monthly users, including
search, Gmail and Chrome, its web browser. Google said it has 800
million monthly users of its Google Drive online-storage service
and 500 million of its Google Photos app.
"Those numbers remind me of how unmatched Google's scale is,
especially given its lack of presence in China," Mr. Goertz
said.
Facebook Inc. is closing in on two billion users on its main
service and has more than one billion additional users on its
WhatsApp messaging service, but no company has as many products as
Google with such reach.
Google also said it would soon enable its Google Assistant to
complete transactions, an opening for the service to make money,
and to provide information about objects in the real world that are
in view of a smartphone's camera.
Separately, Google announced a new stand-alone virtual-reality
headset that doesn't require a computer or phone to function -- an
entirely new product category in the emerging virtual-reality
industry -- with the hope it can become a new hit. Virtual reality
has had relatively slow adoption from consumers because
computer-based systems can cost more than $1,000, while phone-based
systems have lower quality that can make users queasy.
At last year's conference, Google unveiled a virtual-reality
software platform called Daydream to help developers build better
apps and experiences for phone-based virtual reality.
On Wednesday, Google said Daydream would now support stand-alone
virtual-reality headsets, which use onboard sensors, computer chips
and batteries instead of relying on outside phones or computers.
Industry observers have described such headsets as the Holy Grail
of virtual reality because they enable the high-quality experiences
of computer-based systems with the mobility and lower costs of
phone-based headsets.
Google said it was developing such a headset with Qualcomm Inc.,
and HTC Corp. and Lenovo Group Ltd. are building their own versions
to work on Daydream.
Google also announced a new job-search feature in Google search,
pulling data from hiring companies as well as existing job-search
engines such as Monster Worldwide Inc. and LinkedIn, a unit of
Microsoft.
The tool is the latest example of Google pushing into new online
industries via its dominant search engine, including everything
from news to travel bookings to music lyrics. And virtually every
time it has added such a feature, the incumbent companies have
resisted.
Job-search engine Indeed Inc. said Wednesday it was ready for
the challenge from the tech giant.
"We are happy to see that 13 years after Indeed launched, Google
has woken up to the fact that searching for jobs is one of the most
important searches in anyone's life," Indeed President Chris Hyams
said in a statement. "Our 5,000 employees wake up every morning and
go to bed every night focused solely on helping people get
jobs."
The announcement Wednesday that may be most apparent to Google
users is the addition of "suggested" replies for the more than one
billion global Gmail users. The technology, which has been offered
in newer versions of Gmail, uses artificial intelligence to analyze
emails and suggest short, appropriate replies.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 17, 2017 19:14 ET (23:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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