Google: Useful artificial intelligence finally here

Spring may finally have arrived for artificial intelligence, Google executives said Friday.

Speaking at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, executives said that artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced to the point where they are proving genuinely useful, through such technologies as speech recognition and language translation.

“We’ve seen extraordinary results in fields that hadn’t really moved the needle for many years,” said John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering for Google.

“This is another important step toward creating artificial intelligence that can help us in everything from accomplishing our daily tasks and travels to eventually tackling even bigger challenges like climate change and cancer diagnosis,” Pichai wrote in an April letter to shareholders of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Jeff Dean, a senior fellow in Google’s research group, said that if image recognition technology improves to detect fine details in photos, it may help solve health problems such as detecting diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness.

Last year, Google Photos and Yahoo’s photo-sharing service Flickr, for example, miscategorized photos of black people as gorillas or apes.

Google on Wednesday unveiled a voice-activated, Web-connected device called Google Home, a competitor to Amazon Echo.

Laurent Lec, a software director from SoftBank Robotics Europe, on Friday encouraged developers at I/O to create programs for his company’s humanoid robot, Pepper.

Earlier in the conference, he showed how Pepper, a white robot with a human-like face, could read his hand signals and how, through a VR headset, he was able to see through Pepper’s eyes into the audience.