Google CEO Schmidt Pitches Autonomous Search, Flirts with AI

Schmidt said smartphones will surpass PC sales within two years and so vendors' strategies should be "mobile first." Google has bet heavily on mobile, developing its Android operating system to power people on the go.

He noted that LTE, or Long Term Evolution, will roll out from wireless carriers in the United States and abroad, bringing average performance of 8 to 10 megabits per second to wireless networks. Faster WiFi connectivity will lead to more consumption of Web services made by Google and others.

Pairing cloud computing infrastructure with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers will also be important, Schmidt said.

For example, he noted that Google will soon enable users to speak into their phone in English and have it translated into another language by speech-to-text translation software hosted on Google's cloud of thousands of servers in a remote data center.

These technologies are all rooted in speedier Web service consumption, providing efficiencies in a world racked by information overload where people still have too much to do.

Longer term, the more efficient application of Google's technologies will boost peoples' happiness, Schmidt said.

"The use of computers, the use of the information, the use of all of the things that we're all building can make us all have better, more productive, more fun, more entertaining lives, and that to me is that opportunity that is really before us," Schmidt said.

This rhetoric hews to Google's Don't Be Evil ethos on the surface. Yet the company's success is best measured by the $24 billion a year it racks up in online advertising, mostly through search keywords.

The search engine is seeking to find other strong areas of growth.

Google offers cloud computing collaboration software for businesses, where it competes with Microsoft and IBM; social search paired with ads, where it competes with Facebook; and mobile advertising, where it faces strong competition from Apple's iAd in-app ad platform.