Google I/O opened with the tech giant launching a new social smart chat app called Allo. It's a mobile-only app that works just like Hangouts but it's "smarter" in a sense that it has a chat bot that will answer your queries when you have no one else to chat with. It's not a robot nanny but a chat assistant-slash-artificial intelligence that does smart search so you don't have to do it on your own. Just say'Ok Google' and see what The Google Assistant will serve up. Officially known as The Google Assistant, this concept is said to be more of an "ambient experience" according to Google CEO Sunday Pichai.

Computers find it difficult to understand the English language. The U.S. search giant is releasing the code, a piece of software called SyntaxNet and Parsey McParseface for free for developers to use. Together, these pieces of software will allow a developer's program or app to understand written English, something that companies from Facebook to Google have placed great emphasis on. Google's move is significant because artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular, natural language understanding, is very difficult for computers and even harder for developers to code. By opening up the capabilities to do this, Google is giving these developers the chance to integrate natural language understanding into their apps.

Yesterday was the first day of Google's annual I/O developer conference: its equivalent of Apple's WWDC in terms of revealing new products and services for the year ahead. While there were no direct news about the music aspects of Google Play and YouTube, there was plenty for the music industry to think about in Google's other announcements. Starting with Google Home, a connected speaker controlled by its owner's voice, which will compete directly with Amazon's Echo. The speaker will use the Google Cast technology to stream music, which means that services like Spotify will be supported alongside Google Play Music. Amazon's speaker has been a big hit in the US, and Google is training its sights squarely on the device.

The partnership was formed in 2001 to develop a drone that can monitor whales, but it continued to evolve until it led to Emily's creation. Emily's current iteration has two-way radios rescuers can use to talk with the people stranded in the water. It also has a video camera that sends live feeds to responders' phones and lights for night rescues. Emily can be thrown off helicopters and do just fine, thanks to its Kevlar and aircraft-grade composite components. The Navy recently demonstrated its latest version at the Naval STEM Expo and Sea-Air-Space Exposition on May 15th and 16th.

Google unveiled a brand new self-driving car prototype on Tuesday; the first company to build a car with no a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal. The car's arrival marks the next stage in Google's self-driving car project, which was born from the Darpa Grand Challenges for robotic vehicles in the early 2000s. Google kickstarted its own self-driving car project in 2008, and it has been rumbling on ever since, first with modified Toyota Prius and then with customised Lexus SUVs, which took the car's existing sensors, such as the cruise-control cameras, and added a spinning laser scanner on the top. It is the first truly driverless electric car prototype built by Google to test the next stage of its five-year-old self-driving car project. It looks like a cross between a Smart car and a Nissan Micra, with two seats and room enough for a small amount of luggage.

SEO is a constant source of anxiety among business owners and marketers; especially in recent years, as Google has introduced and increased its focus on "contextual" search. The Knowledge Graph is one of the best examples, because it presents a tremendous opportunity for quicker and more detailed viewer engagement--but only if you know how it works and how to get yourself listed. With the above in mind, in this article we'll go over what the Knowledge Graph is, why it should matter to you, and how to best optimize your website for inclusion. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google. It was created in 2012 by Google so that it could better understand the world the way people do by using entity-based searches.

The news was the big surprise saved for the end of a two-hour keynote at the search giant's annual Google IO event in the heart of Silicon Valley. "We have started building tensor processing units…TPUs are an order of magnitude higher performance per Watt than commercial FPGAs and GPUs, they powered the AlphaGo system," said Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, citing the Google computer that beat a human Go champion. The accelerators have been running in Google's data centers for more than a year, according to a blog by Norm Jouppi, a distinguished hardware engineer at Google. "TPUs already power many applications at Google, including RankBrain, used to improve the relevancy of search results and Street View, to improve the accuracy and quality of our maps and navigation," he said. The chips ride a module that plugs into a hard drive slot on server racks.

Last October, a computer system beat a professional human player at the ancient Chinese board game Go. The AI system, AlphaGo, was built by Google and trained using machine learning techniques. Google built the hardware that powered AlphaGo in-house, as it does with most of its infrastructure components. At the core of that hardware is the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, a chip Google designed specifically for its AI hardware, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said from stage this morning during the opening Google I/O conference keynote next to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. This is the first time Google has shared any information about the hardware backend that powers its AI, which will play a central role in the company's revamped cloud services strategy, announced earlier this year.

A few years ago, hardly anyone in the computer science profession would admit to working on "artificial intelligence". Not unless they had tenure. Sure, people would say they worked on robotics, natural language processing, voice recognition, or other respectable application areas. But saying you worked on AI was like saying you were a composer: it implied that you were crazy, pretentious, or both. So it's funny to live in an era where AI is cool again, and only us old-timers remember the carnage of AI winters.