The smart phone age is over and Google thinks AI is next

The modern smart phone era, as kicked off by the launch of the first iPhone 10 years ago, is now mature.

At the launch of Google's Pixel 2 phone in San Francisco today, CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged smartphone features were "levelling off" and said it was hard to develop exciting new products based on hardware alone.

Google said it is in a transition from a "mobile-first" company to an "AI-first" business.

The machine-learning part of artificial intelligence is one of Google's strengths.

Neural machine translation now understands 96 languages and does 2 billion translations per day.

A demonstration that best illustrated the power of the new integrated Google was a live translation featuring a woman speaking Swedish — while wearing wireless Google Pixel Buds headphones — to a person holding a Google Pixel phone and speaking English.
The smartphone era has revolutionised our world. Smartphones are our most used devices but Google and Apple both know the race is on to figure out what will come next.