Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries -- India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom -- from Thursday with support for local languages as well as English. That's less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the United States and promptly told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How do you prevent another glue pizza fiasco in a foreign country? "It's a challenging space," Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search at Google, told Engadget in an interview. "Understanding quality at the scale of the web across all these languages is a hard problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy to do. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty critical."

Google today announced one of the biggest updates to its search algorithm in recent years. By using new neural networking techniques to better understand the intentions behind queries, Google says it can now offer more relevant results for about one in ten searches in the U.S. in English (with support for other languages and locales coming later). For featured snippets, the update is already live globally. In the world of search updates, where algorithm changes are often far more subtle, an update that affects 10 percent of searches is a pretty big deal (and will surely keep the world's SEO experts up at night). Google notes that this update will work best for longer, more conversational queries -- and in many ways, that's how Google would really like you to search these days because it's easier to interpret a full sentence than a sequence of keywords.

Google Assistant buttons won't just be limited to a handful of LG phones this year. The internet giant has widened its partnerships to add dedicated buttons to a whole range of handsets in 2019, including returning partner LG (on phones like the G8 ThinQ, V50 ThinQ and K40) and Nokia (3.2 and 4.2). Phones from Xiaomi (Mi Mix 3 5G and Mi 9), Vivo (V15 Pro) and TCL are also in line for Assistant buttons later on. Google expects over 100 million phones to ship with a hardware shortcut to its AI helper, and that's not including Samsung phone owners who remap their Bixby buttons. On all of these new additions, the button works the same.

Google's Now Playing song recognition was clever when it premiered late in 2017, but it had its limits. When it premiered on the Pixel 2, for instance, its on-device database could only recognize a relatively small number of songs. Now, however, that same technology is available in the cloud through Sound Search -- and it's considerably more useful if you're tracking down an obscure title. The system still uses a neural network to develop "fingerprints" identifying each song, and uses a combination of algorithms to both whittle down the list of candidates and study those results for a match. However, the scale and quality of that song matching is now much stronger.

Google said it is rolling out its visual assistant, which brings ups information as well as ways to interact with apps with a Google Assistant voice request in a full-screen experience, to Android phones this summer. When an Android user makes a query through Google Assistant, Google will provide a more interactive visual experience on the phone. That includes ways to interact with smart home products, like thermostats, or interacting directly with apps like the Starbucks app. Google's visual assistant is coming to iOS devices this year. You can make a voice query such as "what is the temperature right now," and a display shows up with a way to change the temperature.

The company already uses machine learning in Search and other products like Translate -- and the VP of search John Giannandrea is, in fact, a leading AI researcher. Just recently, for instance, the company launched Assistant, a version of Google Now that you can actually converse with. This is the first time we've seen intelligent search working across so many apps, however. For employees drowning in files, it should help them sort out their stuff -- as Google App VP Prabhakar Raghavan puts it, "today the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information." Google also rebuilt Sites, an app that lets corporate users share internal documents like newsletters or account reports.

Google's TensorFlow machine learning system can now be distributed across multiple machines in an update, TensorFlow 0.8. The machine learning software is already distributed across hundreds of machines to speed up the learning process. Google Updates TensorFlow To Version 0.8, Makes It Distributed Google has launched a brand new version of its TensorFlow machine learning system with the aim of improving machine learning and reducing the time consumed while running programs. Last November, Google opened up its in-house machine learning software TensorFlow, making the program that powers its translation services and photo analytics (among many other things) open-source and free to download. Announcing TensorFlow 0.8 – now with distributed computing support!