Imagine a future in which you have long-running personal
conversations with the software that controls your home entertainment system
while letting an algorithmic chatbot handle texting your mom for you. Google
pretty much showcased that vision of the future at its annual developer
conference, I/O, which kicked off Wednesday in Mountain View, California.
In his first I/O appearance since he was named CEO last
August, Sundar Pichai opened by introducing Google Assistant, a voice-activated
virtual assistant akin to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Like Siri, Google
Assistant will be accessible to users through Google's Android phones and
tablets; like Alexa, she'll also live in a stylish new standalone wireless
speaker, which will go on sale later this year. (Evidently, tech companies
can't help but make all their assistants female: In the demos, Google Assistant
speaks by default in a woman's voice, like both Alexa and Siri.)
"We want to be there for our users asking them, 'Hi,
how can I help?'" Pichai told an audience of developers and journalists.
"Think of it as a conversational assistant. We want users to have an
ongoing two-way dialogue with Google."
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