After the previous post honing in specifically on the Google Duplex feature, it’s time to take a look at all the other features coming to the Google Assistant.
We announced our vision for the Google Assistant just two years ago at I/O, and since then, we’ve been making fast progress in bringing the Assistant to more people around the world to help them get things done. As of today, the Google Assistant is available on more than 500 million devices, it works with over 5,000 connected home devices, it’s available in cars from more than 40 brands, and it’s built right into the latest devices, from the Active Edge in the Pixel 2 to a dedicated Assistant key in the LG G7 ThinQ. Plus, it’ll be available in more than 30 languages and 80 countries by the end of the year.
Today at I/O, we’re sharing our vision for the next phase of the Google Assistant, as we make it more naturally conversational, visually assistive, and helpful in getting things done.
The new features will roll out over the coming months.
Call me a luddite, but I don’t want someone hovering over my shoulder and shouting random facts at me– whether they’re called “Google Assistant”, “Siri”, “Alexa” or “Cortana” or “Bob”.
Give me a useful tool– “OK Google” was that tool. It was unobtrusive, it didn’t announce race results before I’d had a chance to watch it, it didn’t want me to take photographs of my meal / restaurant / shopping center, it didn’t ping at me at 7am on a weekend to tell me traffic is light in my bedroom.
Answer my questions– help me search the web… But I can control my DVR, my lights, my shopping habits, feed my cat, look at the weather, drive my car and operate my computer all by my lonesome.
If I want someone listening to everything I say and bringing it up again 3 years from now, I’ll get married.
Followup: Now Google is touting that their AI can make my phone calls, talking to real people for me, and write my emails for me.
Next up, Google Assistant will start answering those calls, and responding to those emails.
Pretty soon, our “society” is just going to be Google talking to itself.
AI is making social interaction redundant.
Hehe.
With all due respect to the brilliant engineers, the hard part of scheduling isn’t the talking to someone over the phone about one very narrowly defined topic, but rather, the deciding how to schedule conflicting responsibilities with multiple people and organisations.
So far this is all cheap (supercomputer) tricks.
I quickly gave up using Siri for anything that it didn’t handle well, which just left the adding of appointments to my calendar, bearing in mind that I would remember on the day that, “appointment with X” was actually “appointment with someone whose name sounds a bit like X”
Thom had an article the other day about how Apple keeps far less information on their users than the other social nightmares.
This of course explains Siri’s limitations– she doesn’t have your entire personal history sorted, indexed and timestamped.
I actually held your same opinion…until I got my first Amazon Echo. Now I have two Echos and three dots in my home. They control my lights and can be linked together in groups for playing music that follows me from room to room. I live alone grant you so I’m not worried about Alexa listening in on my conversations (I only talk to my bird like a crazy person.) I love being able to listen to my morning news briefing while I get my shoes on and prepare to leave. Alexa also updates me with any traffic problems on my usual route. I also love being able to ask quick questions when I’m cooking or if I have a trivia question I need answering. Alexa can even roll dice or flip a coin. She can also make phone calls or send text messages as well as control my Fire Smart TV. Overall I’m quite satisfied. I would suggest that you try one of these smart home devices out yourself before you judge them or decide that you wouldn’t use one. Think of the convenience of Alexa as you would being able to directly make phone calls instead of calling an operator each time you need to place a call as was the case once upon a time.
Edited 2018-05-09 22:35 UTC
I think of it as exactly the opposite: going from directly making a call to using an operator to dial it for me – who is probably eavesdropping after making the connection.
So when is this coming to Chrome, exactly?
and not about the important things such as security.
Never mind the Quality, feel the Width.
This is such a ridiculous reaction to an annoncement. It’s about Google Assistant, of course they will talk about the assistant and not some random security measure. And there is plenty of those too. But maybe we should complain on security annoncements that they are not talking about anything shiny…