Google is set to let users pay off their debts without lifting a finger. The tech giant has announced a new feature that will allow users to transfer funds to friends or family via Google Assistant. Those living in the US will just say'Ok Google, send $10 to Jane for pizza', and the AI will pull money from a linked debit card and forward it to the recipient. Google announced a new feature that will allow users to transfer funds to friends or family via Google Assistant. Those living in the US will just say'Ok Google, send $25 to Manuel Martinez', and the AI will pull money from a linked debit card and forward it to the recipient Google is rolling out a feature that lets users add a credit or debit card to their Google Account, enabling them to easily purchase goods online without.

Spotify's editorial selection and music discovery process are hard to beat (ahem, Google Play Music) and it might get a little better with the company's latest acquisition. The music streaming service has just picked up Niland, a Paris-based machine learning startup that focuses on music search and recommendations. "The team from Niland will join our New York office and help Spotify continue innovating and improving our recommendation and personalization technologies resulting in more music discovery, which benefits both fans and artists," a press release says. "The best part of our journey was hearing from our clients how they were using Niland API to create innovative products that help musicians cut through the noise," Niland writes. Spotify has absorbed AI-minded companies in the past, and its Discover Weekly playlists have proven pretty popular with listeners.

On Wednesday, the showcase started with a keynote from CEO Sundar Pichai who reiterated the company's latest approach for all that it does: artificial intelligence (AI). Google does a lot, from its original search engine function, to email, video services, and mobile software -- and the company wants to see AI will be at the helm of it all. Pichar highlighted this "AI-first" focus, something he mentioned at the I/O last year. Now, Google has given the rest of the world a glimpse of how machine learning will work behind every platform it has. Of course, there's no amount of AI and machine learning-based tech that can work without a specialized processor to run them.

Amazon's voice technology has made its way into Major League Baseball. Earlier this month, the Seattle Mariners became the first professional sports franchise to place Amazon Echo devices inside stadium suites. At Safeco Field, fans at each of the 59 suites can now use their voice to order food, change TV channels, play music, and even have Alexa -- the AI powered voice assistant built into the Echo -- sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame." GeekWire had a chance to test out the new technology this week before the Mariners took on the Oakland Athletics. Fans can use Alexa for its normal capabilities -- asking about the weather, playing music, providing news updates, etc.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades as a computer-science discipline. More recently, it's become part of our daily lives in the form of voice-powered digital assistants, recommendation engines, image-tagging services, etc. We've also seen a crescendo of vendor marketing around "intelligent systems" and how you'll be left behind if you don't buy now. Watch this webinar replay to see what steps CIOs and tech leadership should be taking to ensure that their organization uses AI to best effect while minimizing the downsides.

Trust me, I never thought it would come to this. If you had asked me a week ago what I was expecting from Google's I/O developer conference, "boring" is not the word that would've come to mind. Yet, looking at this year's announcements, I'm struck most by how completely expected and, well, safe it all is. Sure, Google Lens was far and away the best thing Google previewed here, and a standalone VR headset is particularly enticing if you're a VR enthusiast (so far a pretty small, self-selecting group). SEE ALSO: Google's Assistant app for iOS is a clunky mess But none of that is exciting or especially innovative.

Consumer and business users alike are abuzz about the potential of natural language processing (NLP) and how it enables voice assistants as front ends for routine and even specialized tasks. NLP is a set of technologies that enables machines to interact with humans in a natural language to deliver information and insights as if speaking to another person. It's a great equalizer as a front end because there's no need for users to memorize keystrokes or commands. The core components of natural language processing include syntax analysis for parsing sentences and identifying parts of speech; entity recognition for identifying persons, products, events, media and locations; and sentiment analysis for determining the sentiment expressed in the text. Each of these elements helps the program understand the sentence structure, facts posed and emotion conveyed, respectively.

As expected, the opening keynote of Google's I/O 2017 developer conference was a doozy. For two and a half hours, CEO Sundar Pichai and a handful of execs rattled off a staggering list of futuristic features and products: A camera that understands what it sees! AI tools a high-schooler can use to help detect cancer! To watch the address was to feel like the future had just arrived, all at once, right before you eyes. Then you go down the list of actual new things, the stuff you can try right now.

Google just concluded its I/O 2017 keynote, where executives led by CEO Sundar Pichai laid out the company's future roadmap for Android, Google Assistant, Google Home, virtual reality, and much more. Instead, the company has settled into a pattern of releasing information about what it's doing (and what it wants to do) for developers at I/O, instead of trying to wow consumers or the press. You might call that boring, but that's also a misguided notion, because there was much to glean from Pichai and the rest of the Googlers who presented onstage. So here are the 10 most important takeaways from today's I/O keynote. Android's mobile dominance hasn't stopped growing.

Google served up a bevy of announcements, technologies and goodies for developers, but it also highlighted a much larger strategy where the search giant still organizes the world's information, but also begins creating systems that'll add context, delight you and potentially provide more insights. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is Google's competitive advantage and will be embedded everywhere. Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked AI non-stop during his Google I/O keynote and he's rearchitecting the company to be "AI-first." The extent of Google's AI reach is everywhere from Google Photos to Google Assistant to Google Cloud Platform to damn near every other product or service the search giant has. Google's AI efforts will even tap into human resources as it pivots to target job searches.