Google’s Assistant has always been among the most impressive, but it’s not exactly been known for its speed. Often it felt quicker to just do the task manually rather than wait for Assistant to respond.

The main reason for Assistant’s sluggishness, it transpires, is that it required around 100GB of storage in addition to an internet connection.

With some form of wizardry, Google’s engineers have condensed the models down to just 0.5GB which also means it can all run on-device. Naturally, this has sped things up considerably.

“Think of it as putting the power of a Google data center in your pocket,” said CEO Sundar Pichai.

Pichai went on to quip that Assistant is now so fast that even tapping your device feels slow. At this point, more users will find that using Assistant actually saves them time as intended.

The so-called “next generation” Assistant is so fast that it operates in real-time, according to Google VP of Engineering, Scott Huffman.

A demo by a Google employee showed the AI looking up information and multitasking between apps without having to go back and forth between screens.

Furthermore, the assistant will become more personal. Huffman demonstrated that if it’s helped you look for Italian and BBQ recipes in the past, that’s what it might suggest for you to make tonight. “What I love is that different people get completely different results,” Huffman exclaimed.

The recipes will only be available on smart displays like the Nest Home Hub (Google is unifying its smart home branding under Nest going forward).

As for the speedy new Assistant that will, predictably, launch first on Pixel smartphones later this year.

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ML Kit is a new suite of cross-platform APIs from Google enabling app developers to use machine learning for things such as face recognition, text scanning, reading barcodes, and even identifying objects and landmarks.

From the ML Kit documentation page:

“We want the entire device experience to be smarter, not just the OS, so we’re bringing the power of Google’s machine learning to app developers with the launch of ML Kit, a new set of cross-platform APIs available through Firebase.

ML Kit offers developers on-device APIs for text recognition, face detection, image labelling and more. So mobile developers building apps like Lose It!, a nutrition tracker, can easily deploy our text recognition model to scan nutritional information and ML Kit’s custom model APIs to automatically classify over 200 different foods with your phone’s camera.”

Many of these abilities can run offline but are more limited than when connected to Google’s cloud. For example, the on-device version of the API could detect a dog is in a photo – but when connected to the internet – it could recognise the specific breed.

Google says any data sent to its cloud is deleted after processing.

ML Kit is simplifying what used to be a complicated process and making AI more accessible. Rather than having to learn how to use complex machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, retrieve enough data to train a model, and then make it light enough to run on a mobile device… ML Kit enables access to many common features via an API call on Google Firebase.

Developers wanting to get started with ML Kit can find it in the Firebase console.

What are your thoughts on Google’s ML Kit?

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