Google placed a lot of importance on machine learning and artificial intelligence in its third-quarter earnings call. Google CEO Sundar Pichai pointed outthat the company sees investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence as a priority area.
Many Google products already use AI
More importantly, Pichai said the company wants all its products to include more AI and machine learning, and it is ‘re-thinking’ to achieve that goal. Machine learning means to create learning algorithms that do not need any intervention or assistance from humans and learn automatically.
Several Google products already make use of those smart algorithms. These are voice search and translation, Photos and ‘Now On Tap,’ which is a new service that anticipates the information a user might need even before they ask for it. At its developers’ conference earlier this year, Google showed off its smart assistant product, which was apparently far better than Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana.
In reply to a question on Google’s vision, Pichai said the company is making use of machine learning as a way to re-think how it is doing everything. “We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play. And we’re in early days, but you will see us – in a systematic way – apply machine learning in all these areas,” Pichai said.
Alphabet to give more visibility on core businesses
On Thursday, Google parent Alphabet reported its first financial results, and announced it planned to offer more visibility into the performance of its core businesses. The company plans to break out financial results for each division in the next quarter. Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said the company will break out the revenue, net profit and capital expenditures for each division including Google.
For the quarter, Google’s overall revenue climbed to $18.7 billion, representing a growth of 13% YoY while the net profit saw a huge rise of 45% and came in at $3.9 billion. Porat informed that mobile search accounted for the maximum growth, and for the first time, mobile searches surpassed desktop searches.
At around 10.30 am EDT Friday, Alphabet shares were up over 7% at $731.78. Year to date, the stock is up almost 37% while over the last year, shares are up over 32%.
