- The big move to on-device ML for things like speech recognition. This was especially demonstrated with an accessibility angle, showing global subtitles available for any application. And an assistant that allowed you to answer and reply to phone calls using TTS and back.
- Android Q big focus on privacy, promoting privacy to a top level menu item in settings, as well as adjustments in apps to provide ready-access to privacy features.
- Large focus on security, including calling out Gartner reports many times, having the most secure operating system in a number of tests, and most secure device (Pixel).
- Google Home products rebranded as Google Nest. Launch of Google Nest Hub Max ($229), with Camera allowing for Duo calling, and a nice hand gesture to silence the device when loud/noisy (no more shouting)
- Pixel 3a (XL) devices launched, at a lower price point of $399 ($479) with a decent set of features. No longer Verizon exclusive.
- Google wants to be "Helpful"
Obviously Google is throwing a ton of effort into these features, but I am really curious what the productization plan is behind them.
It doesn’t look like they are differentiating their hardware on those features (or maybe I missed it), and it doesn’t look like those features are products on their own.
I’m curious what the long term business plan is behind “Helpful”
Product stickiness? For the competitors, these features are nontrivial to copy. If they work well, people get "addicted" to them.
The issue with Google is that they're an advertising company, so they're always going to have an incentive that pushes them to market your data unlike Apple.
Apple News is already less usable and readable because of Apple's included ad layers.
Apple's ad business isn't a sizable fraction of Google's, but Apple's direction is plenty ad-oriented, so this old canard will probably need to drop by the wayside at some point. It's not entirely meaningful.
Anyway, it's not all on device. There's still data collection. It's collecting some kind of post inception Delta instead of raw data.
What's stopping Apple or a foreign company from shipping these models themselves?
I'm also struggling with whether such a model should fall under copyright. Models would naturally converge.
