Google unveils its own virtual assistant to rival Amazon, Apple

Google, playing catch-up with Amazon's surprise hit Echo speaker, unveiled a rival device called Home that promises even more dazzling artificial intelligence. The Home, slated for release later this year, will be powered by the impressively chatty Google Assistant, a voice-activated rival to Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri that Google execs said can better understand human speech and complex queries. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai -- who took the reins of the search giant last year after founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created its holding company, Alphabet -- showed off the assistant's abilities at Google's annual I/O developer conference Wednesday in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to showing it ordering movie tickets, arranging travel and answering trivia questions, Pichai demonstrated how the Assistant can answer queries about photographs. It can even group them into surprising categories, like those that show "hugs."