Alphabet's Google unveiled its answer to Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant along with new messaging and virtual reality products at its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, doubling down on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the keys to its future. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant, along with the tabletop speaker appliance Google Home. He also unveiled Allo, a new messaging service that will compete with Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger products and feature a chatbot powered by the Google Assistant. Allo, such as WhatsApp, will also have end-to-end encryption when it is rolled out this summer. Amazon's Echo, a surprise hit that has other tech giants racing to match it, uses a virtual assistant called Alexa, a cloud-based system that controls the Echo speaker and responds to voice-controlled commands by users.

First there was TensorFlow, Google's machine learning framework. Then there was SyntaxNet, a neural network framework Google released to help developers build applications that understand human language. What comes next is anyone's guess, but one thing is clear: Google is aggressively open-sourcing the smarts behind some of its most promising AI technology. Despite giving it away for free, however, Google is also apparently betting that "artificial intelligence will be its secret sauce," as Larry Dignan details. That "sauce" permeates a bevy of newly announced Google products like Google Home, but it's anything but secret.

The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it's going to need data. And I'm predicting that we'll willingly give that data. Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa?

Alphabet (GOOGL)-owned Google has unveiled its Google Home device, a virtual assistant designed to answer questions and complete tasks, geared to take on the increasingly popular Amazon (AMZN) Echo. The Google assistant made its debut at Alphabet's developer conference Wednesday, after Consumer Intelligence Research Partners said last month that Amazon sold 3 million 180 Echo devices in less than two years on the market. Google is trying to position Home as a device with even more artificial intelligence capabilities, with the help of its own search platform built into the device. Google Home can change colors, and the company says it also has a learning algorithm to keep conversations going and get to know you better over time. The speaker won't be released until the fall, and the company has yet to share a price tag.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet's Q1 earnings call: "In the long run, we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-first world". This has prompted various speculation on what an AI-first world will look like. Pichai envisages that it will include "assistive" search, "especially on mobile," suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the platform for on-demand services accessed from any device – including smartphones. Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft UK spoke at the AI Summit in London. He believes that AI first (AI as a platform) will "change how people relate to tech and to each other."

YOU may not know it yet, but you're getting a new secretary. Someone to tackle the drudgery of everyday life like booking restaurants, checking the weather and responding to your messages. And the tech world is locked in a battle to build it for you. Google is the latest company to throw its hat into the ring. Last week, at its annual keynote event Google I/O, the firm revealed its new artificially intelligent assistant.

On Wednesday, Google introduced its new personal assistant, Google Home, which will listen to your voice and provide information on demand, much like the popular Amazon Echo. Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana have been chatting with people for years -- and one expert predicts that voice-driven technology will have startling effects on our social interactions moving forward. "There used to be a disconnect between how we interacted with, say, our desktop computers and our family," Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, told The Huffington Post. "We interacted with that computer only when we wanted to. Now technology is pervading the home environment. Your machines can interrupt and interact with you day or night, should they choose to."

On Wednesday Google kicked off its I/O developer conference by unveiling a series of new artificial intelligence-powered products, including a messaging app with a virtual assistant and and a home speaker with a voice interface. Given what we've seen in the explosion of AI assistants and software bots from other companies, you'd expect Google to brand these products' connective tissue with a personality and a name -- Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, and Microsoft has Cortana. Instead, Google's new AI assistant is just called… Google Assistant. What used to be known as Google Now, the predictive assistant inside Android, has been broadened into a bigger initiative to bring those capabilities further into the real world, bolstered by years spent building out its extensive Knowledge Graph and honing its ability to parse human language. It's an indication of Google's ambitions for the product that it wants us to simply call it Google. "We think of this as building each user their own individual Google."

Artificial intelligence sounds cool in theory, and as Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O event on Wednesday, the company wants to "help you get things done" with AI. But one example that Google used to showcase its AI at Google I/O on Wednesday was anything but exciting. Using its new messaging app called Allo, Google showed how easy it is to find restaurants and make reservations, or find a movie and buy tickets. Allo is designed so you can do those things by having a conversational texting session, as you would with a friend, with a bot called @google that uses the company's new AI platform called Google Assistant. There were some other examples, like recognizing the context of messages and pictures you send between your friends and coming up appropriate short replies so you don't have to come up with the response yourself.

Google I/O was full of announcements about upcoming products and enhancements. We're in a seminal moment, said Google chief executive (CEO) Sundar Pichai kicking off the company's annual I/O Conference in San Francisco. Looking back at the past 17(!?) years, Pichai discussed Google's evolution to the live audience of 7,000. As technology gets more sophisticated, he sees artificial intelligence (AI) playing a huge role in the company's next 17 years. "Leveraging our state-of-the-art capabilities in machine learning and AI, we truly want to take the next step in being more assistive to our user. Today, we are announcing the Google Assistant," said Pichai, one of the only people in the world who's allowed to use the "L" word on Search Engine Watch.