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.

Google Home will take on Amazon Echo when the voice-activated device launches later this year. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google officially entered the voice-activated digital assistant race Wednesday with Google Home. The small 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. 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 competing. 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.

Google is taking another swing at the messaging space with a new app called Allo. It's yet another way for users to talk with their friends, but with a couple of neat twists including a "smart replies" feature that even works with photos. Using Allo, people can quickly reply to a conversation using artificial intelligence-driven Smart Replies that Google lifted from its Inbox email product. That means instead of typing a reply, you can tap on bubbles that show up to suggest responses. Smart Replies also works with images, thanks to Google's image recognition technology.

Google had some big announcements to make at its annual developers conference. Here's a quick rundown of what the firm unveiled onstage. Google Home: The company introduced a wireless speaker and smart appliance hub called Google Home, which will be released later this year. The product will be able to stream audio and video like Google's Chromecast devices, as well as control smart appliances. It will also work with smartphones -- you can tell Google Home to change your dinner reservations, and the device will be able to adjust your schedule accordingly.

Those two words are recognized worldwide as a way for any internet user to find an answer to nearly any question. But until now, it's mostly been about typing into a search bar. Now, Google wants you to speak up and chat with your mobile phone and other devices within your home, all powered by its own technology. The Mountain View, California, company revealed two projects, Google Assistant and Google Home, at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, in San Francisco Wednesday. Google Assistant is the company's effort to make search more personalized and efficient for users through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Google has launched a so-called smart messaging application named Allo that features its new Google Assistant. With the aid of artificial intelligence, the app will learn how users speak and eventually generate automatic replies for them based on their previous conversations, the Alphabet unit said at its Google I/O 2016 developers conference Wednesday. Pronounced "Aloe," the product is Google's latest attempt to gain a foothold in the huge messaging app market, where it has so far failed to make an impact against market leaders WhatsApp, Snapchat and Facebook's Messenger. Allo will be based on users' phone numbers rather than their Google accounts (although users will be able to connect that way in the event they desire to do so). It includes all the features expected in a messaging app, including customer stickers that Google commissioned specifically for Allo.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

Australian physicists have used an online optimization process based on machine learning to produce effective Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in a fraction of the time it would normally take the researchers. A BEC is a state of matter of a dilute gas of atoms trapped in a laser beam and cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero. BECs are extremely sensitive to external disturbances, which makes them ideal for research into quantum phenomena or for making very precise measurements such as tiny changes in the Earth's magnetic field or gravity. The experiment, developed by physicists from ANU, University of Adelaide and UNSW ADFA, demonstrated that "machine-learning online optimization" can discover optimized condensation methods "with less experiments than a competing optimization method and provide insight into which parameters are important in achieving condensation," the physicists explain in an open-access paper in the Nature group journal Scientific Reports. Optical dipole trap used in the experiment, showing the three laser beams and the condensate (red-yellow oval in blue square) (credit: P. B. Wigley et al./Scientific Reports) The team cooled the gas to around 5 microkelvin.

With rapid growth of medical informatics technology, a large number of electronic health records (EHRs) have been available in recent years, including a huge mass of data, such as clinical narratives. They have been being used not only to support computerized clinical systems (e.g., computerized clinical decision support systems [1][2]), but also to help the development of clinical and translational research [3]. One of the challenges to use them is that much information is embedded in clinical notes, but cannot be directly accessible for computerized clinical systems which rely on structured information. Therefore, natural language processing (NLP) technologies, which can extract structured information from narrative text, have received great attention in medical domain [4], and many clinical NLP systems have been developed for different applications [5]. Clinical concept recognition (CCR) as a fundamental task of clinical NLP has also attracted great attention, and a large number of systems have been developed to recognize clinical concepts from various types of clinical notes in last two decades.

Google would like to remind you that you can talk with it. Today Google is announcing a "Google Assistant" that essentially performs the same tasks as other Google interfaces do, but in a conversational mode. It doesn't have a name, it just has the power of Google and its deep mine of data behind it. In the past few years, we've seen every other big tech company launch a personal assistant: Apple's Siri. Facebook's M. All are already iconic assistants with distinct personalities -- or at least with the distinct sense that they have personalities. That's mainly because each has a name and a personified intelligence that you imagine you relate to.