Google: Useful artificial intelligence finally here

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday. Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation. But there remains great room for improvement. "We've seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn't really moved the needle for many years," said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google. "I think we're in an AI spring right now."