Google: Our Assistant Will Trigger the Next Era of AI

It is the day after Google’s big hardware event in San Francisco, when the company formally unveiled a new phone and a voice-activated speaker. But in a conference room on the company’s sprawling Mountain View campus, Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company’s shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them. As Pereira explains it, The Transition is a Brink’s Job-level bounty of data that his team and other scientists at Google will receive when millions of people start conversing with his company’s flagship bot, the Google Assistant. Though Google already interprets voice commands in products like voice search in the Google app, the Assistant is different: Google sees it as the apotheosis of its efforts to answer questions and perform functions.