You no longer need to install the Allo messaging app on your iPhone to shoot the breeze with Google's AI Assistant. At the I/O keynote, Google's Scott Huffman announced that the Assistant is truly coming to the iPhone today, as was rumored earlier this week. We're not quite sure yet whether it's getting its own app or will be integrated into the existing Google app, but the important thing here is you'll be able to interact with the Assistant using your voice, whether that means asking it questions or controlling your smart home devices with conversational commands. Before now, you could only get limited Assistant functionality through Allo, which also required you to type queries and orders into the chat app. That doesn't mean you can't use your iPhone keyboard to talk to the Assistant if you'd prefer not to bark at it, though, and this summer, it'll also start understanding French, German, Brazilian-Portuguese and Japanese.

Google Home was a decent first stab at taking on Amazon's Echo, but there's clearly room for improvement. Today at Google I/O, the company revealed that its smart speaker will soon be able to give you proactive notifications, like alerting you to traffic delays ahead of upcoming appointments. Google Home will light up to let you know it has an alert for you, so it thankfully won't just start talking without any prompting. Additionally, you'll be soon be able to see visual responses to your Home queries on all of your devices. So, for example, if you ask for directions somewhere, you'll get that routed straight to your phone.

The Google I/O announcements didn't skimp on the internet giant's domestic assistant hub. Now, users can make hands-free calls on their Google Home -- and so long as they're to anyone in the US or Canada, they'll be absolutely free. The hub recognizes your voice commands and automatically finds the right number from your contacts, but differentiates by your vocal tone, so asking to "Call mom" won't accidentally call your significant other's parent by mistake (and vice versa). While Amazon announced hands-free calls for its entire Echo lineup a week ago, plus video calls with its new touchscreen Echo Show, recipients need to have an Echo device themselves (or the Alexa app installed on their phone). Google Home's feature ostensibly makes standard calls to any phone and will use a private number by default, but users can link it to their personal one.

Google's smart speaker was already handy for a lot of things, but today the company is announcing a ton of new features for the device. At Google I/O 2017, the company said it's adding Bluetooth connectivity to Google Home. This means you'll be able to play music and other audio from any device, including those running Android and iOS. Google also revealed that Spotify's free tier will be available on Home. Previously, you needed a paid monthly subscription in order to beam your tunes to the speaker from that library.

The company's digital helper will soon be available for iPhones too, Google's Scott Huffman announced during the keynote presentation at its I/O developer conference Wednesday. But the entry into the iPhone isn't the only update for Assistant, as Google brings the AI into even more devices. The smart assistant is also getting much, much smarter. Of course, there will be some limits to the assistant's capabilities on iOS, since it's not embedded at the operating system level as it is with Android. The move to the iOS wasn't totally unexpected, either -- a source leaked the news yesterday.

Google Home, the tech giant's digital assistant and answer to the popular Amazon Echo, is adding a long list of new features, Google vice president Rishi Chandra announced at the company's I/O conference Wednesday. The laundry list of upgrades includes more helpful notifications, Bluetooth connectivity, and an expansion to non-U.S. SEE ALSO: Google's data center raises the stakes in this state's'water wars' Proactive assistance was the first new feature announced onstage. That means the device will automatically notify if there's traffic on the way to a calendar event, for example. Chandra called his mom from the stage to demonstrate Google Home's new hands-free calling.

Google has unveiled a raft of new features for Android including a radical image recognition app giving phones'eyes'. Called Google Lens, it will be able to do everything from recognise flowers in a garden to translate menus in a foreign language. The firm also unveil a new iOS version of its smart assistant for the iPhone, taking on Siri, along with updates to its Home speaker turning it into a hands free phone and a smart reply service for Gmail. CEO Sundar Pichai first revealed over 2 billion people are now using Android, and said the future was about speech and vision. 'We are clearly at an inflection point with vision, so we are announcing Google Lens. 'If you run into something and you want to know what it is, you can point your phone at it,' Pichai said.

Google, which gets most of its revenue from its dominant search engine, also released a host of new features for Google Home, a speaker released last year. Users will soon be able to make phone calls using the device, and the HBO Now streaming service, owned by Time Warner Inc, will be integrated as well.

Google gave its Google Assistant a big promotion on Wednesday, adding the ability to control more devices, make payments, and even run on Apple's iPhone as well as consumer appliances. Google's Assistant runs on more than 100 million devices, according to Google executives. The company's goal is to expand its reach, making it smarter and more capable as it goes. Probably the most important Assistant announcement of the morning was Google's plans to integrate Assistant into a slew of consumer devices. The company said it was working with Sony, Panasonic, and others to control them with the Assistant, and even bake it in to the device itself.

As artificial intelligence systems improve, voice assistants like Siri make take a more active role in protecting our computers and our online activity. John Martellaro and Kelly Guimont join Jeff Gamet to look at how Siri may play a bigger part in our personal cyber security, and whether or not that's something we want. As artificial intelligence systems improve, voice assistants like Siri make take a more active role in protecting our computers and our online activity.