Google enters Apple's turf in war  of digital assistants

May 20, 2017 06:00 am

Google is bringing its digital assistant to iPhones as part of its effort to win the battle with tech rivals on artificial intelligence, it announced on Wednesday at its annual developers conference in California.

Google Assistant, the centre of its artificial intelligence efforts, is in a fierce battle with rivals such as Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri to be the top choice for smartphones,connected homes, cars and other devices.

Artificial intelligence is being woven into Google's free Gmail service, used by more than a billion people, for features such as suggesting replies to messages.

For example, opening an e-mail with a dinner invitation might trigger a prompt to reply: "I'm in."

Google machine vision capabilities are also being used to enable services such as recognising who is in pictures and what they are doing, as well as translate languages in signs viewed through smartphone cameras, demonstrations showed.

It also unveiled a second-generation computer chip it designed to boost cloud-computing capabilities in data centres.