"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.

Or it's possibly the most disturbing thing you've seen. A computer, sounding like a human with'umms' and pauses a normal conversation would feature, getting a human to book an appointment. Apart from an army of personal assistants and executive assistants reaching to high-five Google, this move throws up some important issues for businesses. Let's play devil's advocate for a second, this robot can fool a human. Do the different parties have a right to know what is happening?

Google is no longer, at its core, a search engine. And its goal is not to help you find information, but to become an extension of your very self. That might sound alarmist or far-fetched--unless you watched Google I/O 2018, the company's annual developer conference, this week. The big takeaway from the conference is that the Google Assistant--think Alexa, but smarter--has displaced Google search as the company's central product, the one that binds all the others. Its scary-ambitious goal: To blur the line between human and machine to the point where they become literally indistinguishable.

GOOGLE on Tuesday 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. Mr 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 6pm, 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," Mr Pichai told the conference in Google's home town of Mountain View, California. "It turns out that a big part of getting things done is making a phone call."

In one of the most chilling technological demonstrations to date, the internet giant showed its digital assistant could mimic a human over the phone so convincingly the person on the other end of the line had no idea they were talking to a machine. In one demonstration, the artificially intelligent bot called a hairdresser and booked a haircut for its client. In another, the bot made a restaurant reservation after inquiring about wait times to a worker oblivious she was speaking to a computer. The company unveiled the technology this week at its annual developers conference, Google I/O, alongside other artificially intelligent additions that could write emails and drive cars and generally cut humans out of the picture. If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the controversial demo below: Zeynep Tufekci, a technologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina who regularly dispels the benevolent aura of the tech giants for The New York Times, has lashed out at Google's latest showcase experiment.

Google unveiled Tuesday 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.

Match Group, which also owns dating apps OkCupid, Match.com and Plenty of Fish, reported a profit of $99.74 million for the quarter ended March 31, compared with a profit of $20.05 million a year earlier. Analysts had projected profit of $56 million, according to a survey by FactSet. Revenue increased to $407.37 million, from $298.76 million a year ago. Analysts had forecast $386 million in revenue. Revenue at Tinder increased more than 150% compared with a year ago.