There was a time when there was a wonderful vision of the future, with unlimited storage of emails and photos, and predictive texts.
The company kicked off its annual developer conference with a more modest display. It is more pragmatic and sensible than a fantasy play land for tech enthusiasts, and it is similar to Microsoft's business-focused competitors.
It is by design. There is still a bold vision out there, but it is a long way away. The executives who run the company are more focused on getting rid of money spent on research and development.
The company's biggest bet in artificial intelligence doesn't mean science fiction will come to life. It means subtle changes to existing products.
"A.I. is improving our products, making them more helpful, more accessible, and delivering innovative new features for everyone," said the chief executive.
In a presentation that was short on wow moments, executives from the company stressed that its products were helpful.
It introduced a cheaper version of its phone and a new device that has a round screen.
The biggest applause came from a new feature in which the company's artificial-intelligence algorithms automatically summarize a long document into a single paragraph.
It was not immediately clear how some of the other work, like language models that better understand natural conversation or that can break down a task into logical smaller steps, will lead to the next generation of computing.
Some of the new ideas seem to be helpful. A feature called multisearch allows a user to snap a photo of a shelf full of chocolates and then find the best-reviewed dark chocolate bar without using a search engine.
In another example, you can find a picture of a specific dish, like Korean stir-fried noodles, by searching for nearby restaurants that serve that dish.
Machine learning, image recognition and natural language understanding are some of the deep technological work done by the company. It is a sign of an evolution rather than a revolution for the tech giants.
Many companies can build digital services easier and faster than in the past because of shared technologies such as cloud computing and storage, but building the underlying infrastructure is so costly and time consuming that only the richest companies can invest.
The company didn't spend a lot of time explaining how it makes money. The topic of advertising was brought up after an hour of other announcements, highlighting a new feature called My Ad Center. Users will be able to request fewer ads from certain brands or highlight topics they would like to see more ads about.
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