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Google Assistant’s Expansion to Reach 1B Devices By the End of January

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The CES 2019 is already started, and even before Google’s real product launch in the conference, the company has made news with its announcement about the rolling out of Google Assistant, in more than a billion devices, by the end of January.

Google assistant

The google assistant is an AI assistant that runs on various Android and iOS devices, including the smart speaker, home hub, headphones, TV, smartwatches, etc. As of October 2018, the company introduced the same for the home gadgets and the home appliances such as dishwashers, oven, bulb, etc. According to the reports Google Assistant was already running on more than 500 million devices from 1000 different brands in May last year. And, for the last month, Google reported having over 900 million devices enabled with the Google Assistant.

It has been two years since Google Assistant was launched, in 2016, and following then Google is trying really hard to beat its rivals. In a revelation, Amazon has also reported that it sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices last year, making the competition further tougher for Google.

Google has also made some updates to the Google Assistant, along with the support for 22 new languages. From now on, it will also be available for 66 countries. It means, Google Assistant will be supporting 30 languages in total and will be actively working in 80 different countries.

There has been a significant change in the number of Google Assistant enabled devices since last January when the total number of users was over 400 million. The main reason behind the rising number of Google Assistant users may be the Android smartphones that also run the Google Assistant on them.

Manuel Bronstein, the Vice President of Google Assistant, said, “The biggest footprint right now is on the phones. On Android devices, we have a very, very big footprint.” Google Assistant has played a vital role in the growth of the company. Although the smartphone users may not be using the assistant actively, the home devices from Google are becoming really popular, and adopting the AI for its devices is really paying it off well.

Google to Reward $25 Million to the Winners of AI Impact Challenge 2019

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Artificial Intelligence holds a great contribution to the world of technology. But like the sci-fi movies, the AI has got various hazardous impacts to the world, too. Maybe thinking of that, Google is inspired to obtain something better from the AI, and at an event called AI for Social Good, held at the company’s Sunnyvale, California office, it announced a competition for the AI developers, called the AI Impact Challenge.

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Image Source: express.co.uk

According to the announcement, the competition will include non-profit organizations, like universities and colleges, and the other organizations that are not related to the corporate world. The teams will participate in the competition with ideas that will focus on solving social problems with the help of AI.

Google will provide the participants with cloud resources for their projects, and the winners will be rewarded with an amount of $25 million. The initiative is a part of Google’s charitable unit Google.org. The company has said that the participants can be professional AI experts or maybe with no AI skills, as the company will provide the competitors with guides who will help them with their projects. During the event, Google said, “An international panel of experts, who work in computer science and the social sector will assess the proposals to select top winners in the spring of 2019.”

The initiative taken by Google is a part of the ‘AI for Social Good’ and will address the issues like data security, environmental conservation, human trafficking, health care, and other serious issues like controversial military works. In the competition, the participants will be finding the best solution for those issues, using the AI.

Google’s artificial intelligence chief, Jeff Dean, said, “Artificial intelligence is not just helping people create more useful products, we use it in a lot of ways throughout many Google products but is also emerging as a really powerful tool for improving the society that we live in.”

Google is accepting the applications for the competition from today, and the names of the accepted grantees will be announced at the Google I/O developer conference next year. Also, after the competition, the participants may receive some job offers from the Google AI research centres, established earlier this year, in places like France and Ghana, etc.

Get Your Dream Job With AI Driven Job Search Engine From GOOGLE

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Finding a suitable job which does justice to your skill set and work experience is what everyone desires. And believe me, it’s getting harder with every passing day. Few vacancies and so many qualified candidates, you got to act fast, else, another opportunity will slip through your fingers. Although, we have so many job portals to apparently make our hunt for jobs easier, but even checking all the listings on every such site is in itself quite tedious. Not anymore! Google, as always, has something which will surely bring us all some relief.

On 20th June 2017, Google launched an AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven job search aid, integrated within the search engine itself, which is going to virtually combine together the results from major job search boards like LinkedIn, WayUp, Direct Employers, Monster, CareerBuilder, Facebook for your ease. With this all new feature, you no more need to look into all the sites separately. Just a simple Google search and you got the most relevant job postings within a second or less. Not just the results from other sites, Google is also going to show you the jobs posted on a company’s official wall.

You just need to type a simple query like “jobs near me,” “writing jobs”, “jobs in ABC company” etc. into the search bar and you will be redirected to the widget showing the most relevant postings matching your keywords. It is AI’s job to identify that you are looking for jobs and thus, need the help of Google’s job search feature and it won’t stop there. Within the widget you will be provided with different categories and choices like title, date of posting, location etc. in order to get a better idea of what you are actually looking for. Once that’s done, you can even save that final query and Google will make sure to remind you if there is something new matching your description of job requirement.

Zakrasek, Google’s product manager for this project, told TechCrunch “Finding a job is like dating, each person has a unique set of preferences and it only takes one person to fill this job.”

In order to be completely reliable, Google has to filter through duplicate results and show only those which provide complete and true job bio. And that’s what they are working on. Moreover, Google showed no interest in becoming a sort of job portal in itself. They are an add company and that’s what this feature will be doing without getting in way of other job portals.

“We want the players in the ecosystem to be more successful. Anything beyond that is not in Google’s wheelhouse” Zakrasek added

For now, the feature is only available in US  and most likely will be rolled out to other countries in phases.