Google Home makes one heck of a first impression: An adorable little Bluetooth speaker, with a hyper-advanced personal assistant that promises to do things Amazon's Echo can't even dream of. You can even choose the color. On paper, Home seems superior to Echo in so many ways that it doesn't feel like a fair fight. That also may well be true in practice! But the race between Home and Echo may turn out to be a little more complicated than specs.

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. Japan-based SoftBank Robotics announced Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual developer's conference, that it is opening a new Pepper-focused outpost in San Francisco and unveiling an Android SDK, or software development kit, in the hopes of enticing programmers to write code for the robot. "Pepper is ultimately an unfinished product, and we just wanted to incentivize developers to expand the ways in which people can engage with a humanoid robot," says Steve Carlin, vice president of SoftBank Robotics Americas, which has an existing office in Boston. Asked if SoftBank will roll out at SDK for iOS developers, Carlin says he wouldn't rule anything out but "for the moment Android is the pervasive language."

Google used its I/O 2016 event to talk up its work in areas including machine learning and virtual reality, with head Sundar Pichai stating that "we are pushing ourselves really hard so that Google is evolving, and staying ahead of our users". A significant amount of time was dedicated to the growing importance of voice-driven services, with the executive stating that 20 per cent of queries from US mobile users are already made in this way. "Given how differently users are engaging with us, we want to push ourselves and deliver rich information in the context of mobile," he said. Driving this is Google Assistant, which it described as "conversational", and more like a context-aware two way dialogue. This, it said, is enabled by its natural language processing technology – "our ability to do conversational understanding is far ahead of what other assistants can do".

My hopes were high for some earth-shattering VR announcements from Google yesterday. As I watched the keynote on YouTube and sat through a series of announcements that, on the face of it, were rather underwhelming, I started to feel a little less hopeful. When the VR came, it was in the form of an announcement about a new name ('Daydream'), reference specs for VR ready handsets and headsets ('coming this fall') and a peek at the user interface, which looked interesting but somewhere south of what I can already get from Samsung Gear VR. The inclusion of a wiimote style controller was interesting though, and my mind went immediately to the possibility of using this in physical therapy and stroke-rehabilitation. While the future of VR is, in my opinion, very bright and nausea-free, it was the remainder of the keynote that got my neurons firing with possibilities.

With much of what Google announced during the first day of its I/O developer conference focused on helping users answer questions before they even think of them, artificial intelligence is proving critical for the company's strategy. "Google is betting the farm on artificial intelligence (A.I.) and they need to because Microsoft and Facebook aren't too far behind," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. "A.I. will determine the next-generation experience with all electronics. It essentially predicts what users want before they know they do. A.I. is the next big frontier, and Google has always been a pioneer in A.I." During the keynote speech on Wednesday, the company unveiled several upcoming products, including its Google Assistant, Google Home device, the Allo chat app and the Duo video chat app.

Google I/O is the biggest date in the firm's calendar: it's the conference where it gets everyone together in one big room (actually, this year it was a tent) in California to reveal all the cool stuff it has been working on. This year was more focused than most. It's the first I/O since the company restructured itself into Alphabet, hiving off the wilder projects such as Google Glass, self-driving cars and life-extension research into other subsidiaries. Gone are the days of livestreaming a parachute jumper wearing Google Glass from the I/O stage. But that doesn't mean the company wasn't trying to impress with more down-to-earth revelations.

Google jumped into the messaging and digital assistant spaces Wednesday at its I/O developer conference with the Allo and Duo apps, powered by Google Assistant. Chat app Allo is a "smart messaging app that learns over time to make conversations more expressive and productive," according to a Google engineering director, Erik Kay. Duo, meanwhile, is a cross-platform video-chat app similar to FaceTime. Both tap into Google Assistant, a platform which Google CEO Sundar Pichai described as "a conversational assistant" that will allow users to have "an ongoing, two-way dialog with Google." About 20 percent of US Google searches are now conducted by voice, in large part because of Google's strength in natural-language processing, Pichai said, which it has spent the last decade building. "Our abilty [in natural-language processing] is far ahead of what other assistants can do," Pichai said.

As part of an onslaught of upcoming products, Google will implant a more personable form of artificial intelligence into an Internet-connected device called Home, which echoes the Echo, Amazon.com's Meanwhile, Google will also delve deeper into the still-nascent realm of virtual reality with a system called Daydream that's meant to challenge Facebook-owned Oculus' early lead in fabricating artificial worlds. In an attempt to outshine Apple, Google is also adding features to its Android operating system, including the ability to run apps without actually installing them on a device. That feature, called Instant Apps, might have been the biggest breakthrough that Google announced Wednesday at its annual developers conference held in an amphitheater a few blocks from its Mountain View, California, headquarters. It is the first time that Google has held the conference in its hometown since the inaugural event in 2006.

Built-in search, artificial intelligence, machine learning and a knowledge graph connecting billions of entities is how Google plans to ultimately compete and win in many markets where it isn't first today. It's easy to note the me-too items outlined at Google I/O. Android N has a few new features, but doesn't advance the ball that much. Mobile platforms have hit the service pack, incremental update mode. Google Home is Google's answer to Amazon's Echo.

Everyone has a digital assistant these days. Microsoft has baked Cortana into the heart of all its software and Google has just announced a major revamp to what it now calls Google assistant. Apple, on the other hand, has seen its digital assistant Siri fall behind the competition in recent years, but the company is now set to make the biggest overhaul to the feature yet by bringing it to the desktop. The long-rumored move was given more credibility this week when MacRumors published leaked screenshots from a reliable source, showing Siri working on Mac OS X, the Apple desktop operating system that is due to be updated next month. The leaked images show a Siri icon in the menu bar as well as a recognizable waveform logo situated in the part of the interface known as the Dock.