Google held it’s I/O conference last week, and there was quite a lot of interesting things in there. That means this note is going to be mainly focused on that with some related links thrown in for fun.
Instant apps
To me the announcement of Instant Apps was the most perplexing item. Mostly because I don’t see the point of them. The idea behind these instant apps is that (on Android obviously) a website can make you download a smaller, temporary version of an app. You can then use this in much the same way as the main app, but it prevents you from having to install the main app. Or rather, it lets you do exactly what the website itself already does.
So, what’s the point of this then? Google’s message seems to be that it will enable the app/site owners to the use built-in features of the phone. Particularly payments, using Google Pay (I assume Samsung Pay might work as well on Samsung phones). In a way this is comparable to Apple Pay’s announced integration with websites, except that Google’s solution is more likely to take a lot of work from the developers.
Building a stripped down version of your app is possibly in some cases less work than adding a payment solution1, but most sites don’t build their own solutions and instead use payment providers for that. And while it might be a bit of work for the providers, most likely for the website developers it will at most be adding some boilerplate text and checking a box. On top of that, Google’s solution only works for Android and while that has by far the most devices, the best paying customers are still on iOS.
All that said, it might be useful for apps that don’t have a website. The biggest example of which was the early years of Instagram.
Google assistant
From the most perplexing announcement I’ll now move to the most interesting one. The new Google assistant is the “AI” system behind several of the new products that were announced. Obviously AI, by way of machine learning, is one of Google’s big strengths. They’ve demonstrated this not only with AlphaGo, but also in more consumer focused products such as Google Photos. The ability to search for a photo based on image content is not something any of its big competitors are even close to.
So, in that regard, what can this assistant do? Well, we don’t really know yet as any product that includes it is still months away. The demos are quite impressive, but they mostly seemed to focus on leveraging existing functionalities: the aforementioned image recognition and existing Google Now commands. Don’t underestimate that though, OK Google is impressive and works quite well already and I am happy to see that they’re building on that instead of starting completely from scratch2.
What we do know is that it looks to be the foundation for various new products and services. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is going to be underlying most of Google’s existing major projects either. In fact, there are signs this is already the case, even if it’s not explicit. Google Inbox for example already does a lot of things with your email and if at some point an assistant will pop up there to make suggestions that would fit in quite well.
So, how does this stack up against the competition? The major well-known players in this field right now are Google (Google Now/assistant), Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana), and Amazon (Alexa). Well, let’s be honest here. When it comes to quality and good (wanted) results, it’s mostly just Google and Amazon. Apple is quite behind with AI, and there isn’t a lot of news about progress from Microsoft. And between Google and Amazon, it looks like Google has the edge in quality. As explained in this article on Stratechery, that might not be enough to win everyone over.
Related to this, is also the new AI from the maker of Siri. When first created (before being bought by Apple and not much improved since), Siri was quite advanced for its time. Viv (the name of the new AI) seems similarly advanced, but their business model seems to be to make an app for it. Unless something changes in the way apps run, that isn’t likely to make it very popular for quick questions though. The strength of all the others that I mentioned before is that they are directly accessible from their devices.
Google Home
Which then finally brings us to where the assistant will be used. The first of these is a straight-up Echo competitor, named Google Home. Interestingly, this is not build by Nest, but instead by Google. Just like the Chromecast and some less successful products. Again, not much news other than it having interchangeable colors. Until it’s been released, and we know how well it integrates with things not created by Google (the Echo’s biggest strength), all I can do is assume that it’s a copy of the Echo using Google’s AI skills by way of the Google assistant.
Allo and Duo
More messaging apps from Google, or rather one textual messaging app and one video app. Seemingly competitors mainly to Whatsapp and Skype. Duo’s main feature seems to be that it’s not Skype, and that you can already see the video of the caller before you answer the call.
Allo, is just another chat program, but with the Google assistant built in as a bot. As Google’s many other chat applications3, this one faces an uphill battle against the existing solutions. Why would anyone want to switch to this from Whatsapp, Line, Telegram, or even iMessage? Google’s answer this time seems to be the built-in Google assistant. Which is nice, but comes with a drawback. At a time where every other chat app promotes it’s end-to-end encryption, Google assistant makes that impossible unless you turn it off. At which point, why not just keep using what you already use?
Both apps are going to be mobile (Android and iOS) only.
As always, there was a lot more than just the above, but these were the ones I wanted to mention. You can watch the entire keynote on YouTube, and here’s an article with some more of the highlights.