谷歌发展战略的核心是“谷歌助手”。谷歌这次展示了该技术如何被用作其他服务的智能层，比如帮助用户查找更多关于其智能手机摄像头在现实世界中捕捉到的物体的信息。

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, has said for more than a year that artificial intelligence will remake everything the internet company does. Finally, for people gathering at the company’s annual developer conference in Silicon Valley this week, there was a sense of how big that change might be. 

谷歌首席执行官桑德尔•皮查伊在一年多以前说过，人工智能将重塑谷歌所做的一切事情。在这家互联网公司5月17日于硅谷举行的年度开发者大会上，人们终于感受到了这种变化可能会有多大。

In the most visible demonstration of its ambitions to extend the reach of its AI-powered services,Google launched its intelligent assistant — known, simply, as Assistant — as an app on Apple’s iPhone, pitting it directly against Apple’s Siri in a showdown of the intelligent agents. 

谷歌在这次大会上发布的智能助理——名字就叫做“谷歌助手”——可以下载到苹果的iPhone手机上，从而与苹果自己的Siri形成直接竞争。这是谷歌雄心勃勃地想扩展其AI服务应用范围的最明显体现。

Less noticed but perhaps more important was Google’s announcement of a new computing service for businesses and governments hoping to draw on the same AI that powers the company’s own services. “We realise we’re not going to solve all the world’s machine-learning problems ourselves,” said Jeff Dean, one of the company’s top AI researchers. 

不那么引人关注、但或许更重要的是谷歌宣布的一项新运算服务，有些企业和政府部门希望利用谷歌应用于其自身各项服务上的AI技术，拟推出的新运算服务就是为这些组织打造的。谷歌高级AI研究员杰夫•迪恩表示：“我们意识到，我们无法自己解决世界上所有的机器学习问题。”

Instead, the techniques Google has developed for speech and vision recognition are being made available for companies to apply themselves. They will be able to use the technologies for some of their hardest computing problems, such as detecting fraud and analysing large volumes of patient health data, he said. 

相反，谷歌开发的语音和视觉识别技术将可供其他公司自己应用。迪恩表示，其他公司将能够利用这些技术来解决一些最难的运算问题，例如检测欺诈行为、分析海量的患者健康数据。

The new computing service will also propel Google deeper into the chip business, making it an unlikely competitor for the companies building the computing foundations of the AI era, such as Nvidia and Intel. The internet company said ranks of servers based on chips of its own design, known asTensor Processing Units, or TPUs, would be opened to customers as a cloud service. 

这项新的运算服务还将推动谷歌更深入地涉足芯片业务，令人意想不到地与英伟达、英特尔等为AI时代构建运算基础的公司成为竞争对手。谷歌表示，基于自主设计芯片“张量处理单元”(TPU)的服务器将以云服务的形式开放给用户。

“This could have far-reaching consequences,” said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at Gartner, adding that it would bring a step-change to the kind of power that companies have for analysing their own data. “It will be hard for others to compete with Google’s performance.” 

高德纳分析师希拉格•德卡特表示：“这可能会产生深远影响。”他补充称，这将给企业分析自有数据的能力带来巨大变革。“其他公司在性能上将很难竞争得过谷歌。”

In one demonstration of the potential of its increasingly powerful AI platform, Google disclosed it was working with three US medical institutions to analyse masses of health data in pursuit of new ways to improve patient care. 

谷歌披露其正与美国三家医疗机构合作，通过分析大量健康数据，探索新的方法来改善对患者的护理——其日益强大的AI平台的应用前景由此可见一斑。

This was only one aspect of a broad-ranging push into machine learning — the company’s main AI technique — that was shown off this week at its big annual tech showcase event. 

但这只是一个方面，谷歌在本次大会上展示了其在机器学习领域布局广泛的发展战略（机器学习是其主要的AI技术）。

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a short amount of time,” said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. 

CCS Insight分析师杰夫•布拉韦尔(Geoff Blaber)表示：“他们在很短的时间内取得了巨大进展。”

Underpinning this has been the headway the company reported in core technologies such as language understanding and image recognition. The advances have included reducing the error rate of its voice recognition technology from 8.5 per cent to 4.9 per cent since last July, said Mr Pichai. 

这有赖于其在语言理解和图像识别等核心技术上取得的进步。皮查伊表示，有一个进步是自去年7月以来将语音识别技术的错误率从8.5%降至4.9%。

AI has also helped with the design of some of its products, for example enabling it to refine the software in Home, its “smart” speaker. 

谷歌还利用AI技术辅助一些产品的设计，例如改进其“智能”硬件：谷歌Home。

Google has also been working on more ways to embed AI into all of its services. 

谷歌也一直在探索更多把AI嵌入其所有服务的办法。

“It’s more integrated into the user experience,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies. Examples on display this week include applying facial recognition to a user’s photos to recommend other people with whom the pictures should be shared. “

它被更多地融入了用户体验，”Creative Strategies的分析师卡罗琳娜•米拉内西表示。本次大会展示的一个例子是把面部识别技术应用到用户的照片上，然后推荐照片可以分享给哪些人。

At the centre of this push is Assistant. Google demonstrated this week how the technology could be used as an intelligent layer for other services, for instance helping users find out more about real-world objects captured by their smartphone cameras. 

其发展战略的核心是“谷歌助手”。谷歌这次展示了该技术如何被用作其他服务的智能层，比如帮助用户查找更多关于其智能手机摄像头在现实世界中捕捉到的物体的信息。

Assistant is set to become more knowledgeable — and useful — as it starts to appear on more devices and acts as the foundation for more services, said Mr Dean. “We’re starting to get third-party integration points,” he said. 

迪恩表示，随着“谷歌助手”登陆更多设备并作为更多服务的基础，它将变得信息量更大、也更有用。他称，“我们正开始要搞第三方的集成点。”

Launched late last year on Google’s Pixel smartphone and Home, Assistant is still in its early stages. Google this week claimed it was on 100m devices — though that includes all smartphones running the latest version of the Android operating system, even if their users have not tried out Assistant. 

去年底首发、搭载在谷歌Pixel智能手机和谷歌Home上的“谷歌助手”，目前仍然处于初级发展阶段。谷歌称目前“谷歌助手”已经应用在1亿部设备上——不过这包括所有运行安卓(Android)最新版操作系统的智能手机，虽然有些用户从未尝试过“谷歌助手”。

And even Google executives say they are trying to design the most effective ways of interacting with the service to help users make the most of it. 

就是谷歌的高管也表示，他们正尝试设计最有效的与该服务交互的方式，以使用户能充分利用它。

“It doesn’t seem yet that assistants are changing our lives,” Ms Milanesi said. “

目前看来智能助理还没有改变我们的生活，”米拉内西表示。 

Google also faces stiff competition from Amazon, which has moved quickly to consolidate the early lead of its own Alexa voice-operated service. 

谷歌也面对着来自亚马逊的激烈竞争，后者已经迅速采取行动，以求巩固其Alexa语音控制服务所抢占的先机。

But Google has been putting the pieces in place for a battle likely to take years to unfold. Part of that has involved releasing an Assistant app to run on iPhone. Since it is not “native” to the Apple platform, it will not be able to do some things that Siri can, such as set the phone’s alarm. Google hopes it will more than make up for this by being able to operate Google’s own services, such as Maps, and bringing a deeper understanding of the user gleaned from interactions on other devices. 

但谷歌一直在为这场可能持续多年的战斗做准备。推出可在iPhone上运行的“谷歌助手”APP就是筹备工作的一部分。因为该APP并非苹果平台上的“原生性”服务，所以它不具备Siri的一些功能，比如设置手机闹铃。谷歌希望其在某些方面的优势完全可以弥补这点不足，比如说它能够运行谷歌地图(Google Maps)等谷歌自己的服务，或是借助其他设备上与用户的交互来获得对用户的更深了解。

If people come to rely on such services to bring a common experience to all their devices, it could turn software like Assistant into a new computing platform, and, says Ms Milanesi, pose a big challenge to  Apple, which tends to restrict services like Siri to its own devices to support hardware sales. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff Assistant will know that Siri doesn’t,” she said. 

米拉内西称，如果人们逐渐依赖此类服务在所有设备上获得相同的体验，可能会使“谷歌助手”这样的软件成为一个新的运算平台，并给苹果带来巨大挑战，后者倾向于把Siri等服务限制在自己的设备上，以支撑硬件销售。“‘谷歌助手’将会知道很多Siri不知道的事情，”她表示。

The smartphone still dominates computing. But as the new AI-powered platforms take shape, a possible successor to today’s touchscreens and app stores may be starting to come into focus.

目前智能手机仍主导着运算服务，但随着由AI驱动的新平台成形，当今触屏和应用商店的潜在取代者或许开始要浮出水面了。