In a series of posts analyzing what is happening in the digital assistant platform race, this post discusses Google Assistant. Google Assistant technology debuted initially in Google’s messaging app Allo, and Google Home speaker in 2016. Google Home was a direct response to Amazon. They may be perceived as the latest entrant in the digital assistant's race, but Google Assistant core technology has been in the works at Google for many years. Google has been working on NLP for decades, investing on NLP since their beginning and this was in a way a small step for them and to be able to compete with Amazon. Google success in Search and Adwords is due primarily to their early understanding and investments in Natural Language Processing. Google so far has the best commercial conversational platform because of this history. In 2011 Google initiated the Google Brain project working on AI and deep neural network and machine learning to make machine smarter. The Google Brain team developed an AI and machine learning library, TensorFlow, which Google released as open source. It is used today in many applications, including Google Translate since 2006. The theory behind the algorithm and model applied in Google Translate today works for questions and answer chatbots as well, and could be the brain behind Google Assistant.
For those interested in more details: Google Translate uses a sequence-to-sequence neural network model that knows nothing about languages, but it works as well as or even better than linguistic-based translators. The same sequence-to-sequence model can be used to ‘translate’ questions to answers and use context to carry conversations to extract further details. It’s an unsupervised sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural network model (Seq2Seq RNN). Google does not have an e-commerce site like Amazon, but Google understands developers better than anyone, and they understood that opening up the platform to developers, Google has the better chance to become the digital assistant platform of choice for developers. Given the excitement in the developer's community during the preview of the Google Assistant SDK, I would say that Google is on its way to fulfilling its strategy. Realizing that Amazon Alexa is running breathlessly in this race, Google has been just as busy in trying to lure hardware manufacturers to embed Google Assistants in their devices as well as supporting Google Assistant in older versions of Android. Google Assistant already supports a multitude of operating systems and 3rd party devices and TVs, in addition to Google's own devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Assistant). Google Assistant iOS app, it may not be integrated as well as Siri, but it works. It understood well my intents and I didn’t have to repeat myself as often. In regards to the ability of Google Assistant to answer any question, to answer math, science, or trivia questions, it relies on a knowledge base called Google Knowledge Graph that has been build leveraging questions asked in all different ways, millions of them, and associated facts. 70+ billion facts and growing every day, according to Google. Siri instead uses a different type of knowledge base for the same purpose and licensed from a third party, Wolfram Alpha. Amazon has only a limited set of questions that users can ask Alexa. As for the ability of the company to execute and compete on features, Google is the most ‘entrepreneurial’ of the big companies. This mindset and operational strategy works best when you need to move fast and want to earn the heart and mind of developers. Google has a much better balance sheet than Amazon and $B of cash to be able to shrink the gap between the Google Home and Amazon Echo devices. Regarding the 10-point comparison table introduced in the original post, here is how Google Assistant fits in:
Side note: Google Translate supports over 100 languages but Google Assistant only supports the few listed above, so the list of languages supported by Google Assistant will grow rapidly. Siri supports about 30 languages. Alexa just English. Conclusion: Google is the latest official entrant in the personal digital assistant race but it has the best NLP engine of any platform, and arguably they have accumulated an AI and NLP brain arsenal that will be tough to compete with. Their platform will be used to create domain-specific chatbots and leveraging the same technology. Google Assistant will be a dominant digital assistant platform. Comments are closed.
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