Mountain View (United States) (AFP) - Google on Wednesday unveiled a virtual home assistant device that brings together the Internet titan's strengths to challenge Amazon Echo. Google Home, about the size of a stout vase, will hit the market later this year, vice president of product management Mario Queiroz promised at the opening of the Internet giant's annual developers conference in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View. Home devices will incorporate new Google virtual assistant software introduced by chief executive Sundar Pichai. "Our ability to do conversational understanding is far ahead of what other virtual assistants can do," Pichai told a packed audience at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, a venue known more for concerts than for gatherings of developers. "We are an order of magnitude ahead of everyone else."

Hallucinatory image created with Dreamscope app by the author. Google engineers discovered this technique by reversing image recognition neural networks trained on dogs. Something went very wrong with one of Google's neural networks. It was designed for a simple task: identify dogs in photos. But a curious developer reversed the algorithm and it began to hallucinate dogs where there were none before.

If there was a theme to Google's 2016 developers conference, I/O, it was everything you've seen before -- but smarter. More than 7,000 software developers packed the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday to hear Google executives talk about products and features coming to consumers and the developer community. With nearly half the amphitheater exposed to sunlight, the tech giant handed out free sunglasses and sunscreen to attendees, who supplemented with their own caps and parasols. A few developers covered the tops of their heads with Google t-shirts and bandanas. The event had been held in San Francisco's all-indoor Moscone Center for the last 10 years, but Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told the audience that I/O was breaking tradition to signal new beginnings (if not new tan lines).

Google has designed its own computer chip for driving deep neutral networks, an AI technology that is rapidly reinventing the way Internet services operate. This morning, at Google I/O, the centerpiece of the company's year, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that Google has designed an ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, that's specific to deep neural nets. These are the networks of hardware and software that can learn specific tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. Google uses these neural nets to identify objects and faces in photos, recognize the commands you speak into Android phones, or translate text from one language to another. This technology has even begin to transform the Google search engine.

Google had a lot to showcase at its annual developer conference on Wednesday, from a new home virtual assistant to plans to delve deeper into virtual reality. This year's Google I/O focused heavily on machine learning and VR, and how these technologies are being applied to Google's core products. Google Home, launching later this year, is very much what it sounds like: a virtual assistant for your house. It's a voice-activated device meant to be placed in the home that allows for access to Google when your phone isn't nearby. The company also positioned the device as a smart controller for the home during its presentation, saying it's capable of communicating with nearby connected gadgets like smart light bulbs and Nest devices.

Jefferson Graham reports from Google's I/O developer conference, where the Internet giant introduced new home products and apps aimed at having Google make your life easier. The standalone device will compete directly with Amazon's popular Echo and should be available to consumers later this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced at the search company's annual developers conference, Google I/O. The move had been anticipated, as Google looks to put its mark on a coming age of artificial intelligence in which machines learn to interpret and answer human queries by leveraging the speed and scope of cloud computing. Though smartphones still hold a lock human-computing interactions, the surprise hit of Amazon's Echo speaker has energized a new category: speakers run by digital assistants connected to a tech giant's app and content ecosystem. Google Home project lead Mario Querioz held the device in his palm, revealing a design that was shorter and wider than Amazon's cylindrical Echo, which is powered by Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa.

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.

From virtual reality to a new smart-home speaker, Google is showing off just how pervasive it has become even as it's squeezed by its biggest competitors -- Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Google showed off a VR system called Daydream, along with plans for headsets that will compete with Facebook's Oculus Rift. In a jab at Amazon, the company announced Google Home, an Internet-connected speaker that listens for your voice commands to play music or control lights and thermostats in the home. It is reminiscent of Amazon's Echo and will be available later this year for a yet-unannounced price. In an attempt to outshine Apple, Google is also adding features to its Android operating system, including the ability to run apps without actually installing apps.

Forget the CPU, GPU, and FPGA, Google says its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. "TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company's I/O developer conference on Wednesday. TPUs have been a closely guarded secret of Google, but Pichai said the chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, the world champion in the incredibly complicated game called Go. Pichai didn't go into details of the Tensor Processing Unit but the company did disclose a little more information in a blog posted the same day as Pichai's revelation. "We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law)," the blog said.

Google is no stranger to building hardware for its data centers, but it's now going so far as to design its own processors. The internet giant has revealed the Tensor Processing Unit, a custom chip built expressly for machine learning. As Google doesn't need high precision for artificial intelligence tasks, the TPU is focused more on raw operations per second than anything else -- it's an "order of magnitude" faster in AI than conventional processors at similar energy levels. It's space-efficient, too, fitting into the hard drive bays in data center racks.