Google ratcheted up its rivalry with Apple and Amazon by unveiling new smartphones, an internet-connected speaker that channels a digital assistant, and other gadgets the company hopes to make indispensable. The devices announced yesterday are part of Google's bold move to design and sell its own hardware, instead of just supplying Android and other software for other companies to make products. Google is betting that it can design software and hardware to work seamlessly with each other. That's an art Apple has mastered over the past 15 years as it turned out finely crafted iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macs. Google executives showed off a series of gadgets in rapid succession yesterday.

Does your home really need a "smart speaker" that can answer questions, call you an Uber, turn off the lights or play music when you ask? You may be about to find out. Two years ago, Amazon introduced the Amazon Echo, an unassuming, 180 cylinder that sits atop a kitchen counter or bookshelf, acting as a personal assistant that listens to you and does your bidding. Initially, the gadget's main purpose was a little difficult to discern . But Echo and its Alexa voice recognition software have since become a sleeper hit, with an estimated 3 million gadgets sold as of April, according to research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

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In fact, when I look at where computing is headed, it's clear to me that we are evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world. Devices like Amazon's Echo and Google Home are "always-on" intelligent assistants designed to sit quietly and await our bidding. As the devices recede into the background it's the AI-powered services that will come to the fore.

Google is among some of the biggest names in the world of smartphone technology. Everybody knows that Alphabet is a giant in the markets, and is the leading names in stock markets. However, while everybody sees the success, the hardwork is often undermined. It must be kept in mind that to achieve the levels of success they have attained, Google has worked very hard. The company started off as just a search engine, and is a leading name in nearly every business they've attempted their hand at.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been the subject of dreams and visions about the distant future of humankind. Even though we are nowhere near a conscious robotic system, nowadays, AI systems are ubiquitous and showing tremendous successes in various fields of our everyday life. We are using these on a daily basis, often without even noticing. Whether it is the Virtual Personal Assistants on our mobile phones (such as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana), self-driving cars, the ranking of the web pages given your search query, or the classical textbook examples such as spam filtering and recommendation systems of online media providers and marketplaces like Amazon. Various fields of AI have made a major leap forward in the recent years. As most AI systems are too complex to be defined manually, we have to resort to automatically learning rules and patterns from data using sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) techniques.

Google took on rivals Apple, Samsung and Amazon in a new push into hardware Tuesday, launching premium-priced Pixel smartphones and a slew of other devices showcasing artificial intelligence prowess. The unveiling of Google's in-house designed phone came as part of an expanded hardware move by the US company, which also revealed details about its new "home assistant" virtual reality headset and Wi-Fi router system. The San Francisco event marked a shift in strategy for Google, which is undertaking a major drive to make Google Assistant artificial intelligence a futuristic force spanning all kinds of internet-linked devices. "We are evolving from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world," Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said. "Our goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user."

For all the bells and whistles of Google's new smartphone, the biggest point of emphasis is tucked away in small type on the back of the device: "Phone by Google." Today, most of Google's smartphone software runs on devices manufactured by companies like Samsung, LG Electronics and Lenovo, with Google's presence often relegated to the background. But with its new Pixel smartphone, introduced Tuesday at a press event, Google is front and center and selling a phone that it created from the industrial design to the components. Google's new strategy of controlling both hardware and software for its devices puts the company more directly in competition with Apple and many of its own Android partners. It's a necessity, Google says, because of the advent of artificial intelligence.

Even though it was billed as a hardware event, Google's product launch Tuesday was really about artificial intelligence, which is now under the hood of almost all the new gear coming out this year. The power of Google's computer brain is a result of all the searching you and everyone else in the world have done on Google over the years. And now the company is using all that data to build a voice-enabled personal assistant, which will debut on Pixel, Google's new smartphone, as well as Google Home, the company's answer to Amazon's Echo. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said they've gotten really good at helping people figure out what they want to know. Google's Knowledge Graph, that small box on the top of search results with the quick answer you're looking for, now holds 70 billion facts, all of which help power its new AI assistant.

Ahead of the product announcements, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage to say that technology development today has reached a "seminal moment" by shifting from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world. Building on years of work and investment in machine learning, he added, Google is marking that shift by bringing its intelligent Google Assistant to both the new Pixel phones and the new smart Google Home device. Designed and built by Google, the Pixel smartphones -- available for pre-ordering beginning today at a base price of 649 -- will also be the first phones to have built-in support for the company's new Daydream virtual-reality system. The 129 Google Home can also be pre-ordered starting today and are set to begin shipping on Nov. 4. "We're at a seminal moment in computing," Pichai said at the start of today's even.