There's a traditional form for tech events. Before we get to the actual news, there's usually a bit of corporate throat-clearing in the form of figures and statistics. At Apple events, this usually means some very large numbers about, say, the number of apps downloaded, or iPhones sold. At Google's unveiling of its new Pixel smartphones today, the stats were still there, but instead of boasting about sales, they were all about how good Google is at artificial intelligence.

CEO Sundar Pichai led the charge here, noting that Google's Knowledge Graph (the easily accessible information that pop up under the search bar for certain queries) now encompasses 70 billion facts. He then moved onto the company's image recognition tech, noting that it had improved its accuracy from 89.6 percent in 2014 to 93.9 percent in 2016 — a small numerical difference that makes a big difference in results. Pichai topped things off with improvements to Google's machine translation; recently super-charged by deep learning to go from a score in translation accuracy of 3.694 (out of 6) to 4.263. Human-level quality, said Pichai, is only a step away at 4.636.

Facts, pictures, and voices. These are the areas of tech expertise Google is proud of. At the Pixel event, it was made crystal-clear that the company thinks its future lies not in selling hardware or getting people to download apps; but in creating an AI assistant that's always there for users. It's a future that's been promised before, and that's likely still years away, but if Google keeps on focusing on the sort of statistics it loves — like accuracy in machine learning translation — we'll likely get there sooner.

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