Google (GOOGL) kicked off its developer conference Wednesday by highlighting its progress with artificial intelligence. CEO Sundar Pichai opened and closed the closely watched event at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters by outlining the Internet giant's research in AI and machine learning. Among the applications Google sees for this technology is teaching computers how to "see" what's in a person's photo, as well as understanding what users are asking a software program to do, rather than simply deciphering spoken language. All of that baseline research, which companies such as Facebook (FB), IBM (IBM), Microsoft (MSFT) and China's Baidu (BIDU) are also pursuing, today is already being used in Google products in some way, he said. Notably, Pichai explained, Google's focus on AI shows its efforts to move away from its search engine's reliance on links and instead delivering information based on where users and what they have asked for in the past.

According to a new market research report, "Speech Analytics Market by Type (Solutions (Speech Engine, Indexing, Analysis and Query Tools, and Dash Boards and Reporting Tool) and Services), by Deployment Type (On- Remise, Cloud), by Organization Size, by Vertical, & by Region – Global Forecast to 2020?, published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is estimated to grow from USD 589.2 Million in 2015 to USD 1.60 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.0% from 2015 to 2020. Browse 66 market data Tables and 25 Figures spread through 145 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Speech Analytics Market" Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. The speech analytics technology is witnessing the rising demand due to the need to decipher hidden insights from the customer interaction data. Rising number of contact centers, importance of customer feedback, need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), product development, increasing competition among organizations, and stringent compliance management are some of the factors deriving the demand of speech analytics solutions and services. The speech analytics solutions are expected to dominate the market from 2015 to 2020, with larger market share than the service segment, due to growing trends of analytical insights from customer interaction data.

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Pepper the robot is coming to our shores later this year, and its creators want the help of Android developers to help make it smarter. Japan-based SoftBank Robotics announced Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual developer's conference, that it is opening a new Pepper-focused outpost in San Francisco and unveiling an Android SDK, or software development kit, in the hopes of enticing programmers to write code for the robot. "Pepper is ultimately an unfinished product, and we just wanted to incentivize developers to expand the ways in which people can engage with a humanoid robot," says Steve Carlin, vice president of SoftBank Robotics Americas, which has an existing office in Boston.

Pepper is finally coming to America. SoftBank said today that its chatty humanoid robot, unveiled with great fanfare by the company's founder and CEO Masayoshi Son two years ago, is expected to debut in the North American market later this year. SoftBank also announced that a new developer portal is now available to anyone interested in creating applications for the robot. And tomorrow at Google I/O, SoftBank engineers will take the stage, along with Pepper, to introduce a tool that they hope will entice more developers to build apps for the robot: an Android SDK. "We're so excited to see what the development community can bring on to our platform," Steve Carlin, vice president of marketing and business development for SoftBank Robotics America, told IEEE Spectrum, adding that "ultimately what is going to really power Pepper is the creativity of this community."

Google is catching up to competitors Facebook, Apple and Amazon in messaging, video calling and home speaker-embedded digital assistants. But it's taking the lead in virtual reality and may have changed mobile phones forever with a new twist on mobile apps that allows them to play without being installed. That's the conclusion of Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, who was at the Google I/O annual developers conference Wednesday in Mountain View, California. Dawson said Google's new Allo app focuses on the search giant's strengths in search and natural language recognition, but may have come too late behind bigger rivals to gain much use. In a research note he praised Google's new Daydream virtual reality platform, but noted it'll take time to become popular because the high bar for specifications means no devices can support it yet.

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.

It can be a pain to install phone apps you know you'll use just once or twice. The app runs on Google's servers instead of your phone. Only the parts you need get sent to your phone on an as-needed basis. If it works as Google envisions, without lags and other annoyances, users won't have to spend a few minutes downloading and installing that app and having it take up valuable space on the phone. The app maker needs to enable this feature, though.

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews his second match against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo in Seoul on March 10, 2016. The human Go champion said he was left "speechless" after his second straight loss to Google's Go-playing machine.

A sneak peak of what the future holds for Android, Google's artificial intelligence pursuits, and virutal reality. Google announces messaging app Allo at I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. Google debuted its new messaging app to rival Facebook Messenger at I/O, its annual software developers conference. The messaging app has a twist: It's not just for chatting with friends and family. You can ask Google questions the way you would a digital assistant such as Siri.

When Google's AlphaGo computer program bested South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol in March, it took advantage of a secret weapon: a microprocessor chip specially designed by Google. The chip sped up the Go-playing software, allowing it to plot moves in the time-limited match and look further ahead in the game. But the processor, built in secret over the last three years and announced on Wednesday, plays a more strategic role in the company. Google, a division of Alphabet Inc., has been using it for more than a year to...