Google didn’t talk about THIS even ONCE while discussing AI during their I/O 2023 event

The keynote speakers at Google I/O mentioned the word “AI” more than a hundred and forty times… but didn’t even talk about integrating AI into Google’s Assistant even once. In fact, Google didn’t showcase ANY upgrades to their Assistant, proving one thing – Sundar Pichai is Google’s least innovative CEO and leader ever. Sure, these are entirely my opinions, but I’ve got hard facts to back them.

Not improving Google Assistant by integrating AI was a MASSIVE missed opportunity

Back in 2018, Google unveiled Duplex, arguably the first ever impressively-human AI voice assistant that could fool people into believing it was real. Like almost all of Google’s pet projects, Duplex was shuttered following the slightest backlash, and Google now doesn’t even mention its existence while talking about Bard. However, we now need Duplex more than ever… With Google’s AI now being powerful enough to write entire emails within Gmail, having a voice-powered AI that’s as powerful as Bard would be a complete game-changer. Imagine being able to talk to the Assistant the way you chat with Bard, Bing Chat, or ChatGPT. Or have a conversation with your smart home to automate routines or save electricity wherever possible, or your wearable/fitness tracker to motivate you, personalize your diet and exercise plan, and be your al-round personal coach.

ChatGPT is the second time Google felt its core business seriously threatened (TikTok was the first)

The past one year seems to have given Google a bunch of rude awakenings. In July last year, Senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan ominously pointed out that youngsters were using Google Maps less and less to explore places. “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” Raghavan said. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.” Google got yet another violent jolt when OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT in November last year, with Sundar Pichai calling Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back to the company as an ‘existential emergency move’. To make things worse, Microsoft made a major power move by pouring $10 billion into OpenAI and reviving their Bing search engine with new AI-powered chops. Suddenly, Bing managed to hit 100 million daily active users within a matter of weeks. “I want people to know we made them dance,” mentioned Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, referring to Bing Chat’s David-versus-Goliath moment.

Google’s AI boost at I/O 2023 felt like overcompensation (but not necessarily in a bad way)

It seems like Bing Chat really lit a fire under Google’s behind, giving it that push it needed to really make AI more ubiquitous. A strong opposition is the key to a healthy democracy and a strong competitor is the key to great innovation… although it seems like Google was sitting on innovation all along, given that they’ve had these AI models for a while now. Google unveiled Duplex in 2018, and LaMDA in 2020, but it only took up until now for Google to really push out AI tools to users. These were all small-time garage projects up until ChatGPT pushed Google out of its comfort zone. It’s almost like Google had all the AI advancements, but had no idea where to put them until ChatGPT rolled out. The “Help me write” feature in Gmail looks like it was literally lifted from GhatGPT’s abilities to write great emails, pitches, letters, etc. in a variety of styles and emotions… which sort of implies Google’s at that place where they’re too big to have great ideas anymore.

Goomics #291 by Manu Cornet

A look at the Google Graveyard, and how the company treats its most brilliant products

Killed By Google is a website that chronicles all of the products Google axes, from the legacy products like Reader (which really infuriated people) to even Stadia, which was barely a couple of years old, to begin with. The website has listed as many as 285 of Google’s products/services that the company just decided to pull the plug on – some of which were still being heavily used by people (I still use Picasa to this day, no lie). Google operates on what they call a 20% rule, where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their overall office time on their own side projects. This culture resulted in some of Google’s biggest hits, like Gmail, AdSense, and Google News… but remember Inbox? A weird spin-off of Gmail that promised to be a better version of email? It barely lasted as Google pitched the vision and immediately either got bored or tired of it.

The truth is that Google doesn’t really care about what we users think – altruism isn’t a business. Aside from its core money-making businesses, Search, Gmail, Drive, AdSense, Photos, YouTube, and a few of its cloud/enterprise services, everything is potentially ‘cancellable’. Amazon just recently reported that Alexa was a loss-making business to the tune of $10 billion EACH YEAR, so it’s pretty conceivable that Google resigns its Assistant to a similar fate. However, it’s also possible that some young, ruthless startup can light a fire under Google once again, forcing it to come running back to the battlefield with a new and improved Assistant. After all, not many people know this, but Siri was, in fact, a young independent startup that Apple acquired more than a decade ago.

Google Assistant is still way ahead of Siri, hinting at MAJOR complacency

Speaking of Siri, it’s been over a decade since the announcement of the iPhone 4S… and truth be told, Siri hasn’t majorly improved in those 10 years. It still fumbles in places where Google’s own Assistant shines, but don’t mistake that for praise for Google Assistant. It routinely messes up or misbehaves, but not as much as Siri. In fact, many iPhone users found Siri so useless they devised a way to make ChatGPT their default assistant on the phone, with some even creating a ChatGPT shortcut to efficiently control their smart home. This may be a serious indictment of Siri’s abilities, but’s also one of Google’s own Assistant. It seems like Google needs a worthy competitor to be motivated to innovate. Bing did that with Google Search… and I can’t help but think that Google will only upgrade their assistant when Siri drastically improves, or if there’s a much more capable new competitor on the field.

Goomics #377 by Manu Cornet

AI-powered Google Assistant could have really been a part of Sundar’s legacy

What did Tim Cook do for Apple? Well, the Watch and AirPods were launched under him, as was Apple’s push towards building their own silicon chips. Apple became a trillion-dollar company under Cook, and briefly even hit the three trillion dollar mark before settling on 2.71 trillion as of now. Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft by pivoting from Windows to building Azure and other cloud-based services. Microsoft should be like the air you breathe, he would often say. Invisible but important. It’s difficult to really pin-point Sundar’s legacy at Google, considering the company really fumbled on hardware for a bit, building Tensor only after Apple built their M-series chips. Under Pichai, Google canceled Stadia, Chromebooks, Hangouts, Duo, and a bunch of other apps and services. It laid off 6% of its entire workforce in early 2023 (more than 12,000 people), and even though the optics of that looked bad as it is, Sundar Pichai also cut himself a pretty sweet $226 million paycheck in 2022. The point I’m trying to make here is that it’s difficult to think of Pichai as a true innovator because it doesn’t outwardly seem so. At least not two hundred and twenty-six million dollars worth…

However, things could have been different. Instead of Google playing catch-up to OpenAI and other LLMs, Sundar could have doubled down by outdoing them. A conversational AI like Duplex could have really made I/O 2023 much more magical. Sure, you can still talk to Google’s Assistant, but you can’t get it to work across services and data sets the way you can with Bard. For now, Bard is still heavily text-input-based, and one can just hope that there will be some changes in the coming months and years. Until then, at least we’ve got Google’s MusicLM to keep us distracted…

Cover Image via MidJourney
Goomics Cartoon by Manu Cornet

The post Google didn’t talk about THIS even ONCE while discussing AI during their I/O 2023 event first appeared on Yanko Design.

Google’s Project Starline is redefining how we video-chat by using 3D capturing and holograms





Probably spurred by the way the pandemic absolutely upended social communications, Google unveiled Project Starline today at its I/O 2021 event – a one-of-a-kind teleconferencing system that ditches the camera and screen for something much more advanced. Dubbed as a ‘magic window’, Project Starline creates a lifelike hologram of the person you’re chatting with. Rather than interacting with a 2-dimensional representation of them, Starline makes it feel like you’re in a chatting booth with a real person sitting behind a sheet of glass… and it’s all thanks to incredibly complex 3D scanning, imaging, and AI recognition technology.

The video does a pretty standup job of explaining how Project Starline basically works. Instead of two parties staring at their phone screens, Starline’s video-booth allows people to interact with each other via rather futuristic holograms. It literally feels like having the opposite person right in front of you, and the 3D hologram can be viewed from multiple angles for that feeling of ‘true depth’.

The technology Google is currently using is far from anything found in regular consumer tech. According to WIRED, Project Starline’s video booth uses an entire slew of depth sensors to capture you and your movements (while an AI isolates you, the foreground, from the background). 3D video is then sent to a “light field display” that lets the viewer see a complete 3D hologram of the person they’re talking to. In a demo video, people using the tech describe how lifelike the experience is. It’s “as if she was right in front of me,” one person says.

Project Starline is still in an incredibly nascent stage. It uses highly specialized (and ridiculously expensive) equipment, and it hasn’t even been cleared for sale by the FCC yet, which means we’re potentially years away from being able to chat with 3D holograms of each other. There’s even the question of how our existing internet connections could support this dense and heavy image transfer – after all, you’re not video chatting, you’re 3D chatting. Notably, the tech also seems to work only with one-on-one chats (there’s a small snippet of a 3-person chat although the third person’s a baby) and group chats seem a bit like a stretch for now. However, if the demo is as real as the Google Duplex demo we saw a few years back (where an AI booked a reservation at a salon via phone call), Project Starline might have completely reinvented video chats. Can’t wait for a day when smartphones have this technology within them!

Designer: Google

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The Nest Hub Max is the first addition to Google’s revamped Nest family

Quite a few noteworthy things happened at today’s Google I/O event, including some sheer breakthroughs in the way the company processes, stores, and protects data… however on the hardware front, the Nest Hub Max may have been the keynote’s biggest reveal. Google’s shifted all its home accessories to the Nest brand, leaving core operations to Google, and hardware for homes to its then-thermostat-and-security company, Nest. The Nest Hub Max is in, a lot of ways like the Google Home Hub, but takes the mantle from its predecessor and introduces some pretty big changes to it.

First of all, the Nest Hub Max is a pretty large pivot from the Home Hub in terms of visual privacy. While the Home Hub was constantly touted as a camera-less smart home device that didn’t capture you or what you did, the latest Nest Hub Max does quite the opposite. It comes with a camera that sports facial recognition, allowing you to make and receive calls, interact with the display in ways that seemed impossible before, and to an extent even control how the Hub Max behaves around different members of your family.

In many ways, the Nest Hub Max is like a smartphone for your house. Used collectively by all members of the family, the Nest Hub Max combines all of Google and Android’s stellar products/features into one package that sits on your kitchen tabletop, or your coffee table, or even your mantelpiece.

The Nest Hub Max serves all the purposes its previous iteration did. It plays videos, music, allows you to control smart-home equipment, set reminders, wallpapers, and now, even allows you to video call. The device packs a better set of speakers now, making it a much more capable playback device, and sports facial and gesture recognition. However, given the company’s reputation of knowing absolutely everything about you, some would find the Hub Max disconcerting. The device greets you by name when you enter the room, which obviously means it stores facial recognition data… a fact that might give some people chills. The device does come with a switch at the back that allows you to disconnect the camera and microphone (so the product isn’t perpetually watching and listening to you), but that’s hardly reassuring for most people like me. Would I trade that level of privacy for some incredibly useful features to make my home and my family feel enriched? Maybe not… but there are certainly people out there who’d love to own this cutting-edge tech in their homes.

Designer: Google Nest

Image Credits: The Verge

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