With the spotlight on hardware this year,

今年的焦點在硬體

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new artificial intelligence supercomputer chip

谷歌執行長桑德爾·皮蔡宣佈推出新的人工智慧晶片

looking to transform the search giant into an AI first company and a real cloud computing contender.

希望能因此將搜尋引擎龍頭公司變成以 AI 及雲端技術為主的競爭者

We caught up with Scott Huffman, Google's vice president of engineering, and asked just what this supercomputer chip means for Google.

我們訪問了谷歌工程部的副總裁 Scott Huffman 這個智慧對於谷歌會帶來什麼影響

Well we're really excited to be able to have the computing power to be able to really harness all of the newer machine learning algorithms.

我們很高興能擁有這個計算能力來產生這些新的演算法

One of the things that is exciting about these new algorithms is they're very — what in computer science terms we call — "highly parallelizable".

這些新演算法之所以非常令人振奮的其中一個原因是它們非常—在電腦專業術語中我們稱為—「高度並行化」

So you can do many computations at once and get very high scale and process a lot of data that way.

我們能同時做很多項計算並得到大規模、大量的數據

And the new chips are really designed to do that from the ground up.

新的晶片即是為此設計的

So really designed to do the kinds of machine learning processing that we're using a lot of.

它是被設計來做我們常用的機器學習程序處理

Digital assistants are all the rage now, but Google Home sales are still dwarfed by Amazon Echo.

數位助理在現今社會非常夯，但 Google Home 的銷售仍低於 Amazon Echo

How is the Google Assistant different from Siri, different from Alexa, or Cortana?

谷歌的小幫手跟 Siri、Alexa 或 Cortana 有什麼差別呢？

So, one thing that we're very excited about with the Google Assistant,

對於谷歌的小幫手，我們感到最驕傲的是

is the ability to actually go across all the different devices and contacts in your life.

它可以被運用在你生活中各種不同的設備

So as you go from your house, to your car and your commute, to out and about on your day,

當你從家裡到車上、大眾運輸工具、或一天中會去的地方

we want the same assistant to really be available to help you in all those different places.

我們希望同一個小幫手能在那準備為你服務

And so today, we're really excited to deploy the assistant out to all the iPhones,

所以今天我們很高興能將小幫手推出給所有的 iPhone 使用者

make it available to iPhone users in the US,

讓身在美國的 iPhone 用戶都有辦法使用

and we're in the process, of course, of rolling out across all the Android phones, Google Home, Android Auto, Android TV, Android Wear,

而當然我們也在準備推給所有的安著手機、Google Home、Android Auto、Android TV 和 Android Wear

so really making that assistant always available to you no matter what you're doing.

這樣小幫手就真的能隨時隨地為你服務

Now what is it gonna take for voice technology to actually improve?

需要什麼樣的技術才能讓語音科技明顯的進步呢？

Because, you know, I've used all of these devices, and in my own experience, it's still rather crude.

因為我使用過所有的設備，在我的經驗中，語音科技仍很粗糙

Well, so we think we're making a lot of progress, but one of the big things and Sundar talked a little about it today,

我們認為我們已有很大的進展，但很重要的一件事——桑德爾今天也有談到一些

is really using broad-scale data and neural algorithms in order to improve the technology.

是我們在使用大規模數據和神經網路來發展這項科技

So we've been actually pretty significantly overhauling, kind of, all of our algorithms under the hood every couple of years

所以我們每幾年就會很大量的檢查修改我們的演算法

to take advantage of the new computing power that we have and new and larger amounts of data.

以有效利用最新的計算能力及新的數據

And every time that we do that, we see a pretty big jump in improvement.

每次做這件事的時候，我們都會看到很大的進步

One of the things that we did as we worked on bringing Google Home to the market that was really an exciting thing,

另一件我們將 Google Home 推上市場時所做的事

is because Google Home needs to work at a distance, I might be standing far away,

是因為 Google Home 必須要能夠遠距使用，因為我可能會站得比較遠

there's a lot more noise in the microphone signal.

麥克風會收到很多雜音

And so by adding essentially artificial noise into our training data,

所以刻意在我們的訓練數據中加入人工噪音

we were able to have our neural network actually be able to recognize things at a far distance away.

即使在一段距離外，我們的神經網路仍能認得這些東西

So, these kinds of algorithms are very powerful for kind of, shaping recognition in different environments.

這些演算法對於在各種環境中幫忙創造認知也是非常重要的

What is one place that you see the assistant going, where it hasn't gone yet?

你認為除了現在已經有使用的地方，這個小幫手還能運用在哪裡？

Today we're enabling a voice conversation into a great set of functionality

今天我們提供了一項服務，結合語音訊息與各種功能

but that... the users are doing sort of the obvious things on every device.

但使用者仍在在做最基礎的事

But I don't think we fully realized yet the vision of having any kind of conversation you want,

我覺得人們還沒真正理解他們可以有任何一種對話

having it really be understood, and then having the assistant tap in to all the different services in the world and a seamless way to do that.

小幫手都能理解，並輕易地整合到各種服務中

That's really the vision.

這才是我們的願景

And so I think we have a long way to go.

我們還有很長的一段路要走

One example that we showed some beginnings of today that we're really excited about is something we call Google Lens.

其中一個我們很期待看到的、現今也有一些成果的是 Google Lens

And this is just the realization that you know, speaking out loud is great,

這是一種領悟，因為你知道，講話很好

but when I'm talking with my friend, a lot of times what I do is point at something,

但當我在跟朋友聊天時，常常我們會用手指某個東西

and then we talk about that. We talk about what we see.

然後談論那個東西，我們會聊眼前看到的東西

And with Google's advances in computer vision and computer, kind of, image understanding,

而有了谷歌的技術，包含電腦視覺及電腦的對於圖像的理解

the assistant is actually going to begin to have that capability over the next few months,

這個小幫手在接下來的幾個月內，就能開始擁有那個能力

so that I'll be able to open my camera, my viewfinder, and then begin to talk to the assistant about what I see.

我可以打開相機、取景器，然後跟小幫手談論我眼前的事物

And so we're really excited about that.

我們非常期待它的發生