AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans

From a broad Benedict Evans AI reality check; also see Google uses RankBrain for every search, impacts rankings of “lots” of them (Search Engine Land)

"This is clearly a fundamental change for Google. Narrowly, image and speech recognition mean that it will be able to understand questions better and index audio, images and video better. But more importantly, it will answer questions better, and answer questions that it could never really answer before at all. Hence, as we saw at Google IO, the company is being recentered on these techniques. And of course, all of these techniques will be used in different ways to varying degrees for different use cases, just as AlphaGo uses a range of different techniques. The thing that gets the attention is ‘Google Assistant - a front-end using voice and analysis of your behaviour to try both to capture questions better and address some questions before they’re asked. But that's just the tip of the spear - the real change is in the quality of understanding of the corpus of data that Google has gathered, and in the kind of queries that Google will be able to answer in all sorts of different products. That's really just at the very beginning right now."

AI, Apple and Google — Benedict Evans