Yesterday Google made many announcements in the Keynote of Google I/O 2018 including Android P beta (Any Name suggestions???), new Google assistant voices, Smart Compose for Gmail, Augmented reality to the Google Maps, and AI curated Google News. But what was most interesting to me is the new technology that will work under the Google Assistant which is named "Google Duplex" So what this basically means is, once this feature is rolled out, we won't have to make trivial calls like the ones making an appointments or making some enquiry. You can just ask your Google Assistant to make an appointment at, say some Doctor, and it'll Personally call the doctor's clinic, Talk with the receptionist and then confirm to you that you it has completed the task!!! I know!!! Sounds like some Jarvis level s#!t!! In fact, Google played multiple audio clips as a Demo, but It was not a Live Demo.

The more technology advances, the clearer it becomes that our smartphones are no longer about conversing but more about transfers of information. This was evident at Google's I/O keynote, where the company unveiled that its AI can now make phone calls on your behalf, booking salon appointments or restaurant reservations. The demo was stunning, both because of how human this next-level chatbot sounded and how dystopian the world would be with our robot imposters flooding the phone lines. But as I walked out of the conference yesterday, I couldn't stop thinking about the person on the other end of the line. When did human service workers become Google's to experiment on?

Microsoft has surprised no-one by taking part in the AI frenzy currently sweeping the tech industry at its Build conference this week. Multiple projects were shown off; here are some of the most important. First out of the blocks is Redmond's work and a limited beta of squashing Cortana and Alexa together to allow the two virtual assistants to chat together. Talking of talking to AI, Microsoft highlighted an overhaul of its conversational AI bots, which should make it easier for developers to get such smart collections of code up and running on the firm's Azure cloud platform or their own servers, with more options for customisation and integration. For example, a new project dubbed Project Conversation Learner will let developers feed conversations into the bot framework, while Redmond's machine learning tech figures out new dialogue sequenced on top of them. On the topic of projects, Microsoft also showed off Brainwave, a deep learning neural network architecture that's designed, in theory, to make Azure the fastest cloud platform for running AI systems on.

At its big conference for developers on Monday, Microsoft executives were showing what it will be like to live in a world infused with artificial intelligence. Cortana, the company's digital assistant and its rival to Amazon Alexa and Apple's Siri, is at the heart of Microsoft's effort to embed voice and image recognition into more of its services. Microsoft representatives demonstrated how artificial intelligence could help drones spot anomalies they see from above and recognize the people who come into a conference room for a meeting, speedily transcribing what they say. Four years into his gig running Microsoft -- and after initially proclaiming that the world is primarily mobile-first and cloud-first -- CEO Satya Nadella is focused on expanding the powers of Cortana, which is embedded into Windows 10 and has nearly 150 million people using it every month. But there are limitations, and among them is Alexa's popularity in the home through the Amazon Echo.

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online -- simply with music playing over the radio.

Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have transformative effects on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world. The impacts are contributing by automating repetitive task, creating efficiencies, ubiquitously improving user experience, and creating ways for humans to improve our cognition. Furthermore, by 2020, the AI market is projected to reach $70 billion, driven by increasing computational power and improving approaches/applications with machine, deep learning, natural language processing and robotics and many a number of other technologies. To gain a better understanding of the perception of AI in the US, PwC surveyed 2,500 consumers and business decision makers. The objective is to better understand their attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and the future implications on business and society.

"Our vision for our assistant is to help you get things done," Pichai told the conference in Google's hometown of Mountain View, California.Google has unveiled an artificial intelligence tool capable of handling routine tasks -- such as making restaurant bookings -- as a way to help people disconnect from their smartphone screens. Kicking off the tech giant's annual developers conference, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai argued that its AI-powered digital assistant had the potential to free people from everyday chores. Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant independently calling a hair salon and a restaurant to make bookings -- interacting with staff who evidently didn't realize they were dealing with artificial intelligence software, rather than a real customer. Tell the Google Assistant to book a table for four at 6:00 pm, it tends to the phone call in a human-sounding voice complete with "ums" and "likes," and sends you a message with the details. "Our vision for our assistant is to help you get things done," Pichai told the conference in Google's hometown of Mountain View, California.

SAN FRANCISCO: The new Google digital assistant converses so naturally it may seem like a real person. The unveiling of the natural-sounding robo-assistant by the tech giant this week wowed some observers, but left others fretting over the ethics of how the human-seeming software might be used. Google chief Sundar Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant independently calling a hair salon and a restaurant to make bookings -- interacting with staff who evidently didn't realise they were dealing with artificial intelligence software, rather than a real customer. Tell the Google Assistant to book a table for four at 6 pm, it tends to the phone call in a human-sounding voice complete with "speech disfluencies" such as "ums" and "uhs." "This is what people often do when they are gathering their thoughts," Google engineers Yaniv Leviathan and Yossi Matias said in a Duplex blog post. Google Assistant artificial intelligence enhanced with "Duplex" technology that let it engage like a real person on the phone was a surprise and, for some unsettling, star of the internet giant's annual developers conference this week in its home town of Mountain View, California.

Artificial intelligence startup Avaamo has raised $14.2 million (about Rs 95 crore) in a series-A round of funding led by Intel Capital. Ericsson Ventures, Mahindra Partners, Wipro Ventures and WI Harper also participated in the round. The Los Altos, California and Bengaluru-based company, which specialises in conversational interfaces to solve specific enterprise problems, plans to use the funding to expand its sales and marketing. With this fundraising, the company has, so far, raised $23.5 million. "We felt we should get our ecosystem to work with us," said Avaamo CEO Ram Menon.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. This week in Silicon Valley, Google (GOOG, GOOGL) proved it. Several times during CEO Sundar Pichai's keynote presentation at the company's I/O developer conference, the audience of 7,000 gasped or burst into applause. That's because some of Google's massive investments in artificial intelligence are now paying off--in features that truly are magical. And in an absolutely mind-frying demonstration, Google Assistant booked a haircut appointment by placing a phone call to a human receptionist at the salon and having a conversation on your behalf, sounding indistinguishable from a real person.