AI is Google's secret weapon for remaking its oldest and most popular apps

Google shocked the crowd at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday when it kicked off a fascinating discussion about AI ethics with Duplex, a human-like voice system for its Assistant product that makes phone calls on behalf of users. But while Duplex remains a more experimental and far-off effort -- one we'll likely be debating in the weeks and months to come -- Google's more measured approach to artificial intelligence as it pertains to legacy product development didn't garner as many headlines. However, it's those subtle AI-powered changes to existing and pervasive products that will have a far more visible impact on how we use software to interact with the world in the near future. Take, for instance, the ways Google is using AI to improve both its Maps and News products, platforms that have been around for 13 and 15 years, respectively. Google executives onstage at I/O on Tuesday introduced a suite of changes that will make each more useful, personalized, and social, all thanks to self-learning algorithms that are now better at digesting and surfacing information than humans are. Thanks to these advances in AI, Google Maps will soon create Street View-style visual guides for step-by-step directions overlaid onto the real world, as viewed through the smartphone camera.