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ech giant Google is taking the next step in technological advancement by focusing its updates and new services toward the artificial intelligence (AI)-based concept of machine learning, which further enhances digital assistance to every day life.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked of the company’s technological shift, from being “mobile first” back in 2015 to being AI first in 2017.

Its focus for the present is to ramp up machine-learning services, which will make its services become increasingly more assistive to its users through the improved analytical reading of speech and visuals.

To ensure an open future, Pichai said Google would make sure that the tools for machine-learning development would be available for every developer wishing to contribute.

“We believe huge breakthroughs in complex social problems will be possible if scientists and engineers can have better, more powerful computing tools and research at their fingertips. But today, there are too many barriers to making this happen,” he said in his keynote speech during the 2017 Google I/O conference on Wednesday.

The concept of mainstreaming machine learning is not limited to only developers, but also to users as well as companies gradually trying to slip in aspects of machine learning into daily life.

During the I/O Conference, there was only one completely new Google service announced, which was the Google Lens.

Google Lens is a service primarily available on Android smartphones that is capable of seeing an object in a particular picture and able to immediately offer information on it.

This would be useful in cases such as personal research, where users can use Google Lens by pointing their smartphone cameras to an object in front of them.

An example would be pointing at a flower, or a picture of a flower, and Lens provides information on what the flower is and its details on the spot.

Google Lens is part of the company’s machine learning development in analyzing visual information. Another part of that development is the analysis of speech.

Speech recognition capabilities were heightened with the updates to Google Home and to the Google Assistant feature.

After being launched only one year ago, the Google Home and Assistant products will be updated with the ability for “proactive assistance.” This would enable Home to understand the context of one’s daily habits to tailor schedules, reminders and traffic statistics accordingly.

The improvements to Google Home serve as the company’s answer to the industry’s challenges of rival assistant services, such as Amazon’s Alexa, which has seized a considerable portion of the United States home market.

Google Assistant’s upcoming availability on the iOS system will also make it a direct competitor with Apple’s Siri right on its own turf.

Meanwhile, aspects of the anticipated Android O operating system, which currently exists in downloadable beta form, will not be free of machine learning capabilities.

Android will use machine learning to comb through every single app in every single Android device connected to the Google Play app store to help filter unsafe apps from devices.

The service will be dubbed Google Play Protect.

On the virtual reality (VR) field, the company is working on a standalone VR device, which will be a staunch improvement from the current smartphone-dependent Daydream VR set.

It is mainly a few out of a myriad effort to secure Google’s future as the ultimate digital platform.

“It’s inspiring to see how AI is starting to bear fruit that people can actually taste. There is still a long way to go before we are truly an AI-first world, but the more we can work to democratize access to the technology — both in terms of the tools people can use and the way we apply it — the sooner everyone will benefit,” Pichai said.