Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference. There were more details of a new version of Android; new messaging and video-calling apps; a built-in new VR platform for Android; and a good-looking Amazon-Echo-like smart speaker called Google Home. There was even a cool new research project that will let users run portions of apps from the web without installing them first. But the biggest theme stressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants, over and over again throughout the two-hour keynote, was that Google is doubling down on artificial intelligence as the next great phase of computing. And they believe Google can do it better than anyone else.

Google is showing off a new smart-home speaker and a chat service called Allo during its annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. On Wednesday, Google formally infiltrated Amazon territory with Google Home, a small speaker capable of answering voice commands through a new digital assistant. The assistant is similar to Alexa, the artificial intelligence voice assistant powering Amazon Echo, which has surged in popularity in recent months. Although Google Home doesn't launch until the fall, there are some early indicators of how much competition Google will offer Amazon. Here's a look at three reasons Google Home is better, plus three arguments for why Amazon's Echo will continue to dominate: Because Google assistant is connected to the best search engine available, Home is going to provide much smarter results for queries.

You could talk at them--or, really, type at them--and they'd respond like computers. You didn't expect them to. Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's blockbuster annual conference, the company unveiled two new artificially intelligent products--a messaging app called Allo and an Amazon Echo-like device called Google Home--that rely on a "conversational user interface." You talk, they talk back… and they do what you tell them, and maybe more. Conversational user interfaces aren't a new idea; computer scientists have been experimenting with the technology for decades, but they've found new life in virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and chatbot-inhabited messenger apps like Facebook Messenger.

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.

Of course, robots need to be good company if we are to have them in our lives, sharing our homes and workplaces, having them do things for us. And this requirement applies to all robots, not just the walking, talking ones, but also the artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in larger systems or on the web.

Google's finally interweaving the deep treasure troves of information it holds about the world at large and you, specifically. Google Assistant is a conversational digital assistant built around the company's strengths in deep learning and natural language recognition, summoned at an utterance of "Ok Google" to respond to any queries you may have. It can understand context depending on the topic at hand, too: Holding your camera at a famous sculpture and asking "Who designed this?" will get an answer, as will queries like "Show me his other movies" after asking something like "Who directed The Revenant?" Google Assistant will be able to play music playlists, file reminders, help you buy movie tickets, and a whole lot more. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be a discrete app; instead, it appears tied to be baked right into Google-y gadgets, in what Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls "an ambient experience that extends across devices." Think of it as a supercharged version of Google Now, mixed with Amazon's Alexa.

Someday soon we'll sit Amazon's Echo and Google Home side by side on the kitchen counter and do the Pepsi Challenge to see which smart speaker is smarter and most helpful. We'll ask each of their voice-powered assistant services a series of questions. Give them a series of tasks to do. They'll read recipes, give traffic reports, talk about the weather, answer trivia questions. Or at least that's my best guess after seeing Home's unveiling at Google's I/O conference keynote on Tuesday.

Google has done well out of its search box. As our collective dependence on computers and the Internet has grown, we have come to use it more and more--helping Google swell to its gigantic size. But on Wednesday Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said it was time to move on from the conventional search engine that his company was built on. He unveiled Google Assistant, an evolution of Google search designed to act like a virtual concierge. If you search Google for "movies tonight" on your phone today, it will display the films in local theaters.

Sirius [1] is an open end-to-end standalone speech and vision based intelligent personal assistant (IPA) similar to Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo. Sirius [1] implements the core functionalities of an IPA including speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system. Sirius [1] is developed by Clarity Lab at the University of Michigan. Sirius [1] is published at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2015. If you're interested in contributing to Sirius, fork our repo or post to sirius-users.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence is a longstanding science fiction staple that is coming into its own. Google, Facebook, Apple and others are all developing A.I. tools. You can try out some apps today that demonstrate fledgling forms of the technology by smartly, swiftly and automatically doing tasks that would otherwise take lots of effort. The Roll, for instance, is a new intelligent app that can help organize the thousands of photos that you take with your phone. The app scans a photo library, analyzing each image and trying to spot which ones are similar.