It's a reflection of Google's Search and AI advances, an answer to Alexa, an imitation of nothing else precisely and an echo of Amazon's home assistant ambitions. Google introduced it during I/O 2016, and it's what the company simply calls Google Home. It's a front, more so a frontier maybe, that Amazon set out into first, but Google Home is packed with enough promise to serve a serious challenge to the Echo early on. Chromecast has been one of the hottest consumer products since its launch day, and Google Home will build on that success, stated Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google, during a presentation at I/O 2016. "Google Home is a Wi-Fi speaker that streams music directly from the cloud so you get the highest quality playback," said Queiroz.

Meet Jill Watson, a first-time teaching assistant at Georgia Tech assigned to moderate an online forum for a computer science class. Jill was 1 of 9 TAs assigned to help answer questions about coursework and projects from the 300 students enrolled in the advanced course. During the first few weeks in January, Jill really struggled. This was Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, after all, a course with the goal to "build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." It was also a requirement for graduate students to earn their master's degree. It's no surprise then that she needed some coaching, especially since feedback is so critical to student success.

It's hard to make a right turn down San Francisco's crowded streets these days without running into a story about bots, conversational commerce, or conversational commerce bots. Bots have reached kale levels of hype. But amidst the noise, there's something real going on here -- we just have to decipher it. You may have heard of conversational commerce -- it's a catchall term for a future of technology driven by messaging (and voice) interactions that transcend current communications modalities. It's a convenient moniker but also confusing because there isn't one trend to follow.

Alphabet's Google recently revealed Google Home, its response to Amazon's Echo. Like the Echo, the Home is an always-on speaker which listens for search queries, plays music, and controls connected home automation devices. Home is powered by Google Assistant, which can be useful for users who store lots of data on Google services like Gmail and Calendar. Responses to search queries are optimized for audio, which produces more concise results than text. It also synchronizes with any device using the Cast standard, so it can communicate with Chromecasts to play videos, music, or other content.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Will digital assistants make some people totally useless? If you're wrong, you'll have a nice surprise. If you're right, however, everyone will respect your fine judgment. Historian Yuval Harari is a touch pessimistic about the human race.

Today, Google convened 7,000 developers and journalists at a popular outdoor concert venue in Silicon Valley and gave a two-hour state of the union on the future of arguably the most powerful and ambitious company in the world. In front of a packed crowd and tens of thousands watching via live stream, the company brought its best and brightest minds on stage and unveiled to the world that Google is playing catch-up with a slew of products and services we've already seen before from other companies. There's Google Assistant, a conversational AI chat and search bot (Facebook's M/Microsoft's bot projects/Apple's Siri/Viv/literally everyone has a bot these days); Google Home, a voice-powered home entertainment and task hub (Amazon's dreadfully popular and beloved Echo); Allo and Duo, two mobile messaging and mobile video apps (Facebook's Messenger goliath with nearly 1 billion users); and Daydream, Google's Android-powered virtual reality platform, headset, and multimedia content hub (Oculus). But make no mistake, Google, led by its fresh-faced, immaculately tailored blue jacket–wearing CEO, Sundar Pichai, didn't tiptoe around the stage today. Quite the opposite, Google's 2016 I/O keynote address was confident, enthusiastic, and more than just a little impressive.

Lately, there's been a rumble pretty much everywhere about artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, wearables and apps for everything. I've even written about what the rise of digital assistants means to search. There are some who claim that these new technologies will render search obsolete, passed over for the convenience and joy of an always-available digital world. I think they are wrong. Instead of looking at a search engine as an ad platform, we need to remember what it actually does for people.

"We think of the Assistant as a fundamentally different product than search and we think it's going to be used in a different way," John Giannandrea, Google's new search and artificial intelligence chief, said onstage at the I/O developer conference. He didn't delve into specifics, beyond noting that the Assistant is built more around conversations -- tech that talks, nudges and prompts you, not just gives answers. Still, the Google SVP cautioned, dialogue and language are "the big unsolved problems in computer science." One difference could come in the business model. Instead of ads, which support search, Google may dole out its upcoming AI tech to companies and devices that want it.

Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) advertising "profit engine" has been significantly overturned by the smartphone boom, and it has taken quite some time for the company to adapt to the "new world order." The next upcoming wave of computing poses an even greater challenge. At the Google I/O developer conference this week, the Internet search giant announced new technology that will depend "less and less" on screen gadgets to provide information and services to users. A company executive explained that Google aspires for these steps to attract the human attention its revenues rely on, and strategize to make profits later on. Google Home will reside in living rooms, extract voice queries, and provide verbal responses from virtually-designed "Google assistant."

Google this week announced a new messaging app with strong encryption, meaning that your communications can't be wiretapped. But there's a catch: You have to turn on that feature yourself. The tech titan's plan to launch Allo this summer without encryption by default has drawn withering criticism from some quarters. Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new #Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe. "I, too, would prefer that Allo be encrypted by default," said Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute.