The Future of Tech Is Artificial Intelligence and That's Just Fine for Google

Google, with its goofy logo and name, has never really been a flashy tech company. On the product level it's always lacked the showmanship or salesmanship of Facebook or Apple, especially recently, as a surging Facebook has made a series of splashy announcements about its investments in hip new technology -- VR! Bots! Anyone looking for something similar from Google's I/O developer conference this afternoon would have come away disappointed. It's not that the announcements were a bust. The company unveiled a lot of neat stuff. But "neat" is the right word: nothing surprising, nothing game-changing, nothing mind-boggling, nothing bad. Just, you know, neat: Pleasant new apps for chatting over text and video, an Amazon Echo–like speaker called Home, a new-virtual reality headset, and a bunch of new tech specs for developers to pore over regarding Android.