By Yohan P Chawla
Day Two at IAA World Congress, Kochi, saw one of the most eagerly awaited speakers, Simon Kahn, Chief Marketing Officer, Google APAC, engage his audiences with insights galore as he discussed the Future of Digital Immersion. He began with talking about how phenomenally easier access to the internet has become, and how Google is working towards making life simpler for everyone across the globe.
Talking about the tremendous growth of technology, Kahn said, “Technology has grown tremendously. For instance, when you are searching for something on Google, and even if you misspell it, Google will understand and prompt what you wanted to search for, including keywords. And all this happens on a touch.”
Touching upon three ways by which technology will make lives even simpler, Kahn spoke of Assist, Augment and Accelerate.
He said, “In the next step, technology will help us in three ways – firstly assist, then augment our experiences, and finally accelerate the activity one needs to get done.”
Assist
Kahn shared that back in 2013 when Google was working on machine learning techniques to enhance speech recognition, it was trying to figure out a way to somehow make machines understand the human speech in the form of a language, mainly, English. In 3 years time, the speech recognition understands not only over 95% of speech but also small, local cultural nuances including slangs that too in several languages that are spoken around the world. They are training computers to understand human gestures, for example with just a wave of the hand one can instruct Youtube to pause or play a video.
Augment
Kahn explained Augment by simply saying that it’s blending offline and online experiences. Use of Google lens was an amazing example where he showed the true power of our phone cameras. Point the camera to a particular thing, after switching to the Google Lens mode, Google will do a quick image search and tell you what that is. It also helps you shop for a particualt item across the web.
Accelerate
The use of Google’s technology to diagnose certain diseases truly proves the speeding up of the process of getting things done. Trained computer models can diagnose diabetes and cardiac diseases. How this technology helped farmers by doing 3D rendering of each grain and provides the important information about that particular grain.
