Google Home is the next step in artificial intelligence

GOOGLE is taking its artificial intelligence platform to the next level, designing it to assist with anything from guided meditation to ordering pizza.

INTERNET giant Google will launch its latest vision of the future on Friday and that future involves ordering pizza using nothing but your voice.

The company will also add exercise instructions, medical advice, news headlines, travel trips, and even guided meditation to the skills of its internet-connected smart speaker Google Home this week, though the device will not officially launch in Australia until next year.

Google’s addition of more third-party apps to its artificial intelligence platform is part of a company-wide move to get users “having a conversation” with Google, rather than just entering search terms into a web browser.

Google Assistant product manager Valerie Nygaard said many of the first external apps added to Google’s artificially intelligent speaker would deliver experiences, such as exercise and education.

“You could do guided meditation, you could take a language lesson, you get recommendations on books, movies, wines, that sort of thing,” she said.

“The user might say, ‘OK Google I’d like to meditate,’ or in our case they could say ‘OK Google, talk to Headspace,’ and then Headspace comes on in and says ‘would you like to relax?’.”

You’ll now be able to order pizzas and meditate with the help of Google Home. Picture: Supplied.

Google’s first third-party partners will include Domino’s Pizza, Fitstar, Lonely Planet, WebMD, Wall Street Journal, and the Food Network, though Ms Nygaard said Google was talking to many brands keen to work out how to let their customers “talk” to AI apps in a conversational way.

“The best practices in this field are not well know. Humans all have it but designing something that will interact with humans (in a conversation) is different,” she said.

Ms Nygaard said Google would switch its focus from experiences to transactions in third-party apps next year, letting users order items from online shops, for example, simply by talking to their Google Home speaker.

That could include making restaurant reservations and booking movie tickets, she said, right through to more niche transactions like booking hot yoga classes.

Users can currently use the Google Home smart speaker to book rides with Uber, though Australian users must first import the $US129 device from the US.

Google is bringing artificial intelligence into the home. Picture: AFP

Google will go head-to-head with Amazon in the race to bring artificial intelligence into the home, as the company already provides information, recipes, and grocery shopping through its Alexa speaker, which is available in the US and parts of Europe.

Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have also made substantial investments in artificial intelligence in a bid to predict what their users want before they want it, automatically recognise people and objects, and suggest purchases.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson travelled to Mountain View as a guest of Google.

Originally published as Google Home is the next step in artificial intelligence