Google I/O 2016: Everything you need to know about AI

This has undoubtedly got to be the year of the bots. If Microsoft Build wasn't a sign of the changing times, then Facebook Bots ought to have been. But if you still weren't convinced, then Google I/O 2016 should have sealed the deal for you.

At its annual developer event, Google took its efforts with NLP a step higher. Google Assistant is quite like version 2.0 of Google Now. Beginning with Google chief Sundar Pichai, speakers at the event spoke about the decade old investment by Google in the field of NLP. The examples demonstrated at the event included the process of booking movie tickets for the family.Explaining the process for booking movie tickets, Pichai commented how laborious it all feels. In his words, 'On a Friday night, if you want to take your family for a movie, you normally pull out your phone, research movies, check out their reviews, find out movies playing near you and then book tickets.' He then conveniently highlights an example of how life could be. Imagine if you could just have a chat conversation, quite literally in speech. All you'd need to do is ask Google Assistant, 'What's playing tonight?' And continuing over the conversation, arrive at 4 tickets of Jungle Book for the family.

Similarly, if the expertise around NLP is taken into other areas, you could soon have voice-based search queries on Google. An example was asking who directed The Revenant? When Google Assistant returns the name of the director from a straightforward query, it feels like there's nothing different in existing search capabilities and the result it throws. The name of the director -Alejandro González Iñárritu. Pichai's next query, 'show me his awards.' To which Google Assistant displayed results that were based on context. Try asking Google 'show me Alejandro González Iñárritu's awards'!