It was Assistant, the artificially intelligent digital helper that caters to your every whim and powers your every interaction. Assistant is invisible, in the design-jargon sense. The omnipresent concierge works in the background, predicting your needs, processing your requests, and offering neatly parceled answers to your questions. You never see the cogs behind it, you merely type (or speak) a command and read (or hear) tailored responses served on screen or through a speaker. This requires more than a smartphone, which explains the gadgets Google announced Tuesday.

Shifting users toward intent-driven interactions is key to making AI work. Take this typical Spotify interaction: Open your phone, open Spotify, click to search, type what you want to hear. If you're just listening on your phone, you're done. Anything else takes a bit more work. "If I want to stream music to speakers in my living room, that's multiple steps I have to take, and I have to work through discovering the trigger points on the app," Mann says.

It was Assistant, the artificially intelligent digital helper that caters to your every whim and powers your every interaction. Assistant is invisible, in the design-jargon sense. The omnipresent concierge works in the background, predicting your needs, processing your requests, and offering neatly parceled answers to your questions. You never see the cogs behind it, you merely type (or speak) a command and read (or hear) tailored responses served on screen or through a speaker. This requires more than a smartphone, which explains the gadgets Google announced Tuesday.