Google touts AI and search advances at I/O conference

Google is speeding up Google Assistant on smartphones, by bringing more of the AI processing to the smartphone. The on-device features the company demonstrated focused mainly on tasks for controlling the phone, such as turning on the flashlight or taking a selfie, though some also drew on information stored in e-mail, calendar or photos and sending that information to other people. The features are coming first to new Pixel phones later this year.

One of the most frustrating things about Siri is the latency. Given Apple have touted their on-device machine learning, it would be great to see them make the same move as Android and move commands to the device first, only phoning back home as a fallback.