Breakingviews: Google gadgets show intelligence

Published Wed, Oct 5 20162:44 PM EDT

Breakingviews

Robert Cyran

Google's new gadgets suggest there's intelligent life elsewhere. The $540 billion tech titan just unveiled its own smartphone, virtual-reality headset and home assistant. They mostly mimic similar devices from Apple , Facebook and Amazon . The machine learning powering them however, should lead to plenty of market opportunities for Google and its parent company, Alphabet . More from Breakingviews : LVMH gets first-class luggage at no-frills price Its previous hardware efforts have not generated much commercial success. A television remote control covered with dozens of buttons, for example, exposed a failure to grasp what consumers desire. Google's earlier smartphone initiatives also were troubled by a lack of quality customer service and the difficulty of competing with itself in the form of multiple rival handset manufacturers using its Android operating system. The company has learned, but not enough. Its new Pixel phone comes with features such as a camera Google claims is the best available on a smartphone, unlimited video storage and a digital assistant. The device, however, is too similar to previous iterations or Apple's latest iPhones. Google's virtual-reality headset only marginally differentiates itself from Facebook's Oculus Rift. And Google Home is an all-too-obvious answer to Amazon's table-top, voice-controlled speaker, Echo. All these apparatus run on, and take advantage of, artificial intelligence. Language processing, translation and voice recognition are improving rapidly. Google's devices may never be profitable on their own, but they nevertheless will serve as showpieces for how to integrate its apps and test-beds for software developers. Google is confident the world is moving from a "mobile first world, to an artificial intelligence first world." Based on the speed at which machine learning is advancing, it sounds like a safe bet – even if it's hard to predict how long this pace can be sustained. The sums at stake, however, are bound to be huge. The ability to instantly and nearly perfectly identify images, find information in other languages and obtain answers to vague queries is obviously useful. After all, the five most valuable U.S. companies by market value today are in the tech industry, and based mainly on comparatively primitive information technology. Google gizmos probably won't become the norm, but what's inside them just might. For more independent commentary and analysis from Reuters Breakingviews, visit breakingviews.com

The front of the Google Daydream View VR headset is shown on display during the presentation of new Google hardware in San Francisco, October 4, 2016.

Beck Diefenbach | Reuters