Technology

Google just built a two-story theme park in CES 2019

Written by Abdul Wahab ·  1 min read >

Google just constructed a two-story Disney-like theme park with singing ‘animatronic macarons’ to showcase the prowess of its voice-enabled digital assistant.

The CES 2019 has kicked off and there have been some new and exciting technologies by various manufacturers, the majority of CES 2019 has been a ‘hardware show’, however, Google is one such company that has made it into a software event.

Throughout CES 2019, the search engine giant showcased some new and exciting features of its AI-assistant and the two-story theme park which resembles Disney’s theme park, “it’s a small world” is another attempt to highlight Google assistant’s prowess in the field of WaveNet; Google Assistant’s speech synthesis model which is powered by deep neural networks, to generate natural sounding voices.

The theme park includes an “interpreter mode” which enables some of Google’s smart home devices to work as translators. This is Google’s most recent feature which uses Google assistant to converse real-time translation, this feature has been rolled out to Android phones and “Pixel buds” over the past year. The park includes a roller-coaster-like train which travels through the two-story building at slow speeds. Along the ride, visitors are greeted with talking and singing characters which showcase Google’s various voice-assistant features.

This is the second year where Google has showcased its Assistant at CES, it seems that Google is trying to outdo its only major competitor, Amazon’s Alexa which has given Google some tough time in the smart speaker market. Back in May 2019 Google in its I/O event announced a couple of new features like notes integration and Pretty Please for the Google Assistant. However, the feature that caught everyone’s eye was how the AI-assistant was able to converse with a person in a real-time call in a completely normal and non-robotic way. Let’s see what new and exciting offers Google assistant has to offer in 2019.