A few thoughts on the Google I/O keynote
by Volker Weber
Google I/O keynotes are always a mix of great things and not so great things. Just a few examples of things announced at Google I/O that never lived up to their hype: Wave (2009/2010), Android@Home (2011), Nexus Q (2012), Google TV (2012) Google+ (2012/2013) and Google Glass (2012).
Today was special because Google was in full "me too" mode.
- Google Assistant is ... Microsoft Cortana & Amazon Alexa
- Google Home is ... Amazon Echo & Sonos
- Allo/Duo is ... WhatsApp & Snapchat & Facetime
Everybody is into the same things. As if we needed more messaging apps, more video chats, more assistants, more speakers, etc. We will have a bunch of solutions that don't work together. Messaging has always been walled gardens, where you first have to convince all your friends to join up.
And I have serious doubts that people will want to have Google listening into their homes and their chats. Do you want to hear what you said to Google? It's all here.
Comments
What is the difference between IFTTT constantly using your GPS sensor in your phone to activate / deactivate your alarm and Google listening to when you speak to it. Either you trust or you do not trust cloud services. And I think larger vendors can be trusted more because they have more to lose when something goes wrong.
In the end, I think, the vendor with the best understanding of spoken language and best AI is going to prevail. Siri certainly does not understand me well enough and is not smart enough. The race is on and I think Google does have a fair chance.
That Google history URL for audio is scary. Thanks, much appreciated!
Never owned any iPhones or Lumias, never used that thingy on my Nexus either, in fact I disabled everything around that, and for good reason I think now.
Google was the only big player trying to create a instant messaging client (Google Talk [1]) based on open standard (XMPP), and failed :-(
Too bad, if Google talk would have been successfull, the IM world would looks different today (iMessage, WhatsApp... based in XMPP).
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk
