Google Home is the latest embodiment of a virtual assistant. The voice-activated speaker can help you make a dinner reservation, remind you to catch your flight, fire up your favorite playlist and even translate words for you on the fly. While the voice interface is expected to make quotidian tasks easier, it also gives the company unprecedented access to human patterns and preferences that are crucial to the next phase of artificial intelligence. Comparing an AI agent to a personal assistant, as most companies have been doing of late, makes for a powerful metaphor. It is one that is indicative of the human capabilities that most major technology companies want their disembodied helpers to adopt.

It was Assistant, the artificially intelligent digital helper that caters to your every whim and powers your every interaction. Assistant is invisible, in the design-jargon sense. The omnipresent concierge works in the background, predicting your needs, processing your requests, and offering neatly parceled answers to your questions. You never see the cogs behind it, you merely type (or speak) a command and read (or hear) tailored responses served on screen or through a speaker. This requires more than a smartphone, which explains the gadgets Google announced Tuesday.

Google had more fun at the expense of Apple, poking fun at its South Bay neighbor by announcing Pixel comes in three colors -- quite black, very silver and really blue.

We've scoured the web to find you the best deals on good products. Despite Google's latest announcement, there's no denying Amazon has one heckuva head start with its smart assistant Alexa and the Alexa-enabled products. The Echo, Echo Dot, and Tap have become a great addition to any home of the future. The list of things Alexa can do is pretty extensive. Once you add in the handiness of a smart assistant (ever wonder how much the sun weighs in grams?) the usefulness is pretty apparent.

Not even Disney princesses can find a decent match on dating apps. In the comics below, which originally appeared on College Humor, illustrator Paul Westover shows us what it would look like if Disney princesses had met their princes online. Let's just say they'd be better off doing happily ever after alone.

Google's CEO wants Google to become more than a search engine for everyone -- he wants it to be personalized. Sundar Pichai opened up Google's event Tuesday talking about the history of computing and how it's gotten to where it is today. Specifically, how artificial intelligence is the future of Google and the future of computing in general. "When I look ahead at where computing is headed, it's clear to me that we're moving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world," Pichai said. "Our goal is build a personal Google for each and every user. Just as we built a Google for everyone, we want to build each user his or her own Google."

At its #madebygoogle event today, the company's engineering lead for Google Assistant, Scott Huffman, explained how the AI-powered system would get several new features and capabilities in the days to come – and it all sounds pretty exciting. For starters, Huffman noted that, beyond featuring in Allo and Home, Assistant will be an open platform that developers can build functionality for, and also integrate the service into their own products. It'll allow people to do things like find information about local businesses, search YouTube for videos and surface content through deep links into installed apps. To that end, Assistant will support two kinds of actions: Direct actions, which allow it to accommodate simple requests like'turn off the lights', and Conversation actions, which require a bit of back-and-forth between the user and the system (such as booking an Uber to go to a specific destination). The possibilities for developers to build actions for their own services into Assistant are seemingly endless: Huffman said that the platform will allow for complex activities like ordering groceries and playing games through text, voice and hybrid interactions.

"Google" is a great name. Twenty years ago it was a playful, made-up word (a riff on "googol," which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). But it's time to let Google go. We've already witnessed the unfortunately named Google Play Music All Access, Google Videos, and Google, among many others. The latest victim of this stubborn branding strategy is the company's digital assistant.

The era of Artificial Intelligence [AI] has certainly redefined work in many industries. It has already proved to be effective at automating repetitive tasks that salespeople, HR specialists, and CXOs would otherwise spend more time and effort. For SMB business owners, these AI apps can bring tremendous gain to their operational processes and workflows, as they can now spend more time growing their businesses. Researchers and scientist have presented AI tools to solve a specific problem, one that uses datasets in order to learn and replicate information and behaviors. Going forward, AI will bring new opportunities for industries, starting new company, creating jobs and eventually bring changes in the workplace.

Google on Tuesday officially announced a major change in its strategy to go after the smartphone market, as the search giant unveiled a'family of products' -- Pixel, Daydream, Home, and WiFi -- to venture into a new category of products which have both'hardware and software made by Google'. Taking the stage at the event, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, noted that when Google was founded in 1998, there were about 300 million people using the internet, the vast majority of whom were sitting at desktop computers and looking for answers that came in the form of blue links. But today, the internet community is closer to three billion people, and users are searching for all kinds of help across different contexts and devices, from cars and your classrooms to homes and the phones in people's pockets. When I look at where computing is heading, I see how machine learning and artificial intelligence are unlocking capabilities that were unthinkable only a few years ago. This means that the power of the software -- the'smarts' -- really matter for hardware more than ever before.