Google Assistant will be the core of new hardware

Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off today’s keynote event by emphasizing the company’s shift in focus from “mobile first” to “AI first”, and saying it wants to create a personal Google for each user. The company demonstrated the fruit of its efforts earlier this year by giving us a taste of its Assistant bot in its Allo messaging app. But that isn’t enough. Pichai said for Assistant to be truly helpful, it needs to be available universally, and so the company today showed how it will be bringing the helper to phones and homes.

Hardware chief Rick Osterloh detailed how the company is working on hardware built around Google Assistant, starting with the new Pixel phone. Google Assistant starts listening on the new Pixel phones when you hold down on the Home button (similar to how you’d activate Google Now before), or when you say the hotword (“Ok Google”).

In a demonstration, Google Assistant brought up (and rattled off) a list of events from the Hearst Greek Theatre in response to a query about happenings there. Then, when asked to play music by The Lumineers, the helper brought up a YouTube video of the band’s music and automatically started playback. You can also ask Assistant to show you your pictures from a specific date, and it will return images that match that criteria.

Pichai said Google improved the quality of its artificial intelligence from 89.6 percent in 2014 to 93.9 percent today, and this helps the system better recognize pictures so Google Photos can more accurately find the images you’re looking for. This helps Assistant be more helpful to you. The Pixel phones come with Photos built in.

To bring the Assistant into our abodes, the company is also adding it to the Google Home smart speaker. You can use it to manage everyday tasks and play tracks from YouTube Music, as well as Spotify, Pandora and Google Play Music. In addition to the voice trigger, a touch panel at the device’s top lets you activate Assistant. You can tell the speaker to turn the volume up or down, or play specific compilations. Plus, if you don’t remember the exact title of a song, you can say something like, “Ok Google, play that Shakira song from Zootopia,” and Assistant will know you’re looking for the song “Try Everything.” That’s powered by Google’s search engine.

You can also get answers to your questions through Assistant in Home, such as what singer Adele’s real (or full) name is. It’ll understand follow-up questions, as demonstrated onstage when Assistant understood that it was still talking about Adele when asked, “How many awards has she won?”

Assistant also understands traveling and navigation information. Google showed how a query for “nearby camping stores” returned companies such as The North Face and REI in the area. Then, it provided traffic information for and the time needed to get to each of those locations.

At the start of the day, Assistant can also run down your list of upcoming activities and reminders, and does so somewhat colloquially. For instance, in a demo, it said, “By the way, remember to cook dinner for your kids tonight,” instead of something more stilted, like “You have a reminder for ‘cook dinner for your kids.’”

Assistant can also control your connected home appliances, and Google is partnering with Nest, IFTTT and a growing list of brands to integrate the service. Plus, Chromecast (and Chromecast Audio) owners can also use Home to play videos, songs and pull up specific Google Photos on your TV (or speakers).

Lead engineer for Assistant Scott Huffman said the company plans to launch an open developer platform to let anyone create actions for Assistant. It will let partners come up with so-called Direct Actions for easy, straightforward tasks such as turning on the lights. Another method is conversational actions, which creates a back-and-forth between you and Assistant to get you what you need, such as an Uber ride. More information on Actions will be revealed in December, said Huffman, but the goal is to get Assistant working with every app and platform available.

Google promises that Assistant will get better with time, but it already looks to be a solid amalgamation of all of the company’s services that you can access from basically anywhere. That is, if you have a Pixel phone or Google Home.

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Google finally takes control of its phones, thanks to Pixel

Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL aren’t just a pair of handsets that Google’s mobile division is producing with a third-party, like its Nexus devices. No, these two new phones are emblematic of a dramatic shift in the way that the firm is going to build products in the future. The division, led by former Motorola chief Rick Osterloh, is behaving much more like a traditional phone manufacturer, signing deals with mobile networks and managing distribution all by itself.

In an interview over at Bloomberg, it’s revealed that Google is taking an approach much closer to that of partners like Samsung. For instance, Android engineer David Burke let slip that the company has designed a product roadmap that stretches years into the future. Burke himself concedes that he’s been playing with a Google-branded handset that won’t debut until Fall 2017.

It’s not just the designs of the hardware that Google is working on, either, since the company is now building its own supply chin. The company used HTC to assemble the Pixel phones with off-the-shelf components, but that won’t be the situation in future. Instead, executives claim that they’ll look to build their own custom silicon, pushing out suppliers like Qualcomm. As much as it’ll annoy people to see the comparison, it does seem as if Google’s in-house phone arm is cribbing from Apple’s business playbook.

In the piece, Google makes assurances that its own mobile division will be treated equally to other manufacturers. For instance, there is a “firewall” between the hardware and Android divisions so that Osterloh and his team can’t peek at what Samsung and LG, amongst others, are working on. The company says that every manufacturer will be treated the same, although it’s telling that the Pixels will be the first to get Android 7.1 and other new Google features.

It’s worth mentioning that we’ve been down this road before, both with Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility and Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia. Both companies had previously acted as an enabler, providing software and support to their partners in the hardware space. Google, cannily, seemed to make it clear that the Motorola deal was more of a business decision (for patents) than an attempt to out-muscle its partners.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was treated like a pariah by mobile device manufacturers who saw that they’d be treated as second-class citizens. When Microsoft went on to design and build Surface tablets, it caused further consternation and a very public war of words with executives at other companies. It remains to be seen if Google’s trusted cohort of partners will feel similarly aggrieved, but we can imagine Samsung wondering if Tizen isn’t worth putting on a Galaxy S handset. We also know that Huawei has already rebuffed Google’s Pixel phone strategy as it tries to assert its own dominance.

Amusingly, a 2011 Engadget editorial on the Motorola – Google deal remarked that we should “check back in three years and see if Motorola hasn’t become Google’s de-facto mobile division.” That, obviously, didn’t happen, although the fact that the former head of Motorola is running Google’s in-house mobile division a few years after means that we’re gonna claim partial credit.

If you needed any further evidence as to where Google sees its future, simply flip the Pixel over and look at the back. At the bottom you’ll find the phrase “Made by Google,” with no reference at all for the moribund HTC, which is simply a contract manufacturer for Google like Foxconn is for so many others.

Click here to catch all the latest news from Google’s fall event.

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Source: Bloomberg, Google