Why Apple Is Watching Google’s AI Progress Carefully – Fast Company

If you see the tech world as a competition between major platforms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Samsungas I doGoogle made several announcements at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday that could affect the balance of power.

As the maker of the second biggest mobile operating systemin the world, Apple may be the company Googles AIadvancements impactthe most. Many will be watching to see what sorts of AI capabilities Apple announces at its WWDC developer conference coming up June 5.

In this season of developer conferences (Microsofts Build was just last week), its become clear that all the companies that make up Big Tech have been working hard to leverage artificial intelligence in their products. More specifically, scientists and engineers at these companies are teaching computers to talk and see, through technologies such as natural-language processing and machine vision.

Many of the things announced here at Googles conference hit on these dominant AI themes in some way.

Google Lens, for example, brings sight to the Google Assistant service, identifying and analyzing images you snap with a smartphone so that the Assistant can act on the data. Lens can read a restaurant menu written in another language and translate it; the Assistant mightthen provide example pictures of the food choices. There could be a business here as well as a useful tool: For instance, a restaurant might pay Google for the right to display marketing language around the image of its storefront as seen by Lens. I expect the computer-vision aspect of the Assistant to get far more interesting over time.

Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart likes the concept but not the use cases Google chose to showcase it. Its not enough to just say you can walk around taking pictures of storefronts to get Yelp ratings, he says. Its fair to assume Apple will be playing in this area going forward.

Googles Photos app uses AI to pick your best shots, label them, and even suggest people you could share the photos with based on the people its recognized in the shots. Another feature makes whole albums full of photos show up in someone elses Photos app, again based on the people detected in the photos.

For many users the new features in Photos might be useful in combating the common problem of having hundreds of memory-using photos on ones phone and never really using them for anything.

Apple is very likely to talk about how its bringing it AI further into its own Photos app to fix some of the same problems Google fixed, saysGlobal Data analyst Avi Greengart.

Right now Google appears to be well ahead of Apple in delivering useful AI-powered experiences.

Comparing Google AI and Apple AI is relevant because both companies want their apps and services to get as much phone screen time every day as possible. The screens of the more than one billion iOS devicesis a big battleground for both companies. Apple wants these devices to spur consumption for its digital services business, which it wants to double in the next four years.

It might hurt Apple if Google could leverage superior AI to create more compelling apps and services, says Tech Knowledge analyst Carolina Milanesi. That might cause significant numbers of iPhone users to adopt them, displacing Apple apps. Apple abhors the idea of being just a hardware company; it wants to supply the whole experience, including software and services.

And iPhone users do have a choice. Google also announced Wednesday that itsAssistant is now available on iOS, as is itsAllo messaging app and lots of other Google ware. People who prefer Googles assistant over Siri can easily use italthough the fact that its not built into the operating system means that you cant wake it by saying OK Google as you can on an Android handset.

Siri is clearly behind other assistants, both in her ability to comprehend and in her ability to act on information she hears from the user. But Siri isjust one end point for AI (albeit a big one). Tosay Apple is behind in AI doesnt quite capture the nuance of the situation.

At WWDC, Apple might announce enhancements to the AI behind things like Photos, Maps, and Messages in ways that solve real problems. They might be different than the ones Google and others have used AI to solve.

As Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead points out, Apple doesnt like to be forced into pushing out new products or services purely because of competitive pressure, and it has rarely done so. It has lots of people working on AI, but is being very thoughtful about where and how it exposes it.

Apple also isnt likely to talk as loudly about AI as Google does. Google, after all, is a software and services companyyoud expect it to focus on AI. Apple is mainly a hardware company (and, yes, increasingly a services company). Its more likely to focus on functionality that AI helps improve, rather than dwelling much on technical underpinnings.

One clear advantage Google enjoys in AI is access to lots of personal user data that it pulls from services such as Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar. Google will leverageas much user data as privacy concerns permitto help the Google Assistant become an expert on the users life, something like the way human assistants become more valuable as they learn more and more.

For example,the Assistant running on the Google Home smart speaker could notify you that traffic on the way to your next appointment is bad, and to allot extra time. It might know that a flight listed in an email has been delayed and alert the user to that.

Apple, by contrast, has shunned collecting personal data because of privacy and security concerns. Theres no doubting thats a good thing from a privacy perspective, but it might hinderthe company from arming Siri with the information she needs to be an expert on the users life.

Apple, however, has more control over the chipsrunning the on-device AI computations on its gadgets than Google does. Apple is highly competent in optimizing chipswhich it designes itselffor the needs of its own software. Apple may simply be able to leverage more computing power in its devices than Google can in third-party Android devices. Some AI computation can happen in the cloud, but that costs milliseconds and could raise security risks.

After watching this weeks announcements about the new AI powers in Googles assistant, Im reminded that theres far more to releasing winning apps and services than sheer technological prowess. Google has on numerous occasions released productsthat were technically impressive but betrayed a woeful misunderstanding of what people might find useful (Google Wave, Google Glass, etc.).

Apple doesnt need todemonstrate superiority over Google in the pure science part of artificial intelligence. It can win by coupling its AI chops with a superior understanding of how people will best benefit from AIin day-to-day life.

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Why Apple Is Watching Google's AI Progress Carefully - Fast Company