All That New Google Hardware? It’s a Trojan Horse for AI
The focus of Google’s big hardware event this week wasn’t the hardware at all. It was Assistant, the artificially intelligent digital helper that caters to your every whim and powers your every interaction.
Assistant is invisible, in the design-jargon sense. The omnipresent concierge works in the background, predicting your needs, processing your requests, and offering neatly parceled answers to your questions. You never see the cogs behind it, you merely type (or speak) a command and read (or hear) tailored responses served on screen or through a speaker.
This requires more than a smartphone, which explains the gadgets Google announced Tuesday. But as Google likes to say, these are early days for a multi-portal system that includes a phone like Pixel and an Amazon Echo-like device like Home. “Five years ago, if we were talking about this, there was the belief that the phone would be the interface to everything,” says Alan Black, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute.
