Google’s great challenge is to redefine the way users interact with the Internet, so that when the search box which underpins its success is outdated, the company is still in control of consumers’ experience. Much of the race to dominate that user interaction has focused, in recent years, on artificial intelligence (AI) and some of its offshoots like machine vision. The rather crude first generation examples of the new web experience, like Apple Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa, will evolve into far more sophisticated tools in future, harnessing machine learning to understand and predict the customer’s choices, together with virtual reality and computer vision to reinvent the user interface. At the heart of all that is Google’s Assistant software,…