I'm watching the livestream and will yack about it here.

The big thing so far is the new "Google Home" gadget. The hardware is analogous to an Amazon Echo, but it's got built-in support for Chromecast and they're trying to be very clever about the sorts of instructions you can give it. One example command was "play Coldplay in the living room". So think of this as Chromecast + Sonos + Echo. Oh and they want to kill your alarm clock while they're at it, so you can probably instruct it to play some playlist at a given time in the morning.

One of the features of the canned video was "hey Google, turn on the lights in the kid's room." So they're also going after the rest of the home automation market.

Oh boy, yet another communications app. "Allo". ("It's a smart messaging app.") They appear to be doing the iMessaging thing and will latch onto your phone number to semi-automatically divert SMS traffic into Allo. Sure, it's got all kinds of AI goodies, but ... what about Hangout? What about my friends who I can only really communicate with via Facebook Messenger?

Yee haw, they've got a clever UI to let you change the font size.

The AI parts are all fine and dandy, but they've added "incognito mode" with end-to-end encryption. That's a big deal.

"Duo is the video companion to Allo", end-to-end encrypted, and works on iOS and Android. The claimed novelty is that you get a video preview of your caller prior to accepting the call.

Android N: still no name yet, instead a PR stunt, where people can share name ideas with Google. Yawn.

Three claimed improvements in Android N:

- Vulcan (improved 3D rendering, lower CPU overhead than OpenGL)
- New JIT compiler (30-600% performance improvements; also, lower install latency, especially when you install a new OS version)
- Security (better "file based" encryption, fixing the mess of the media framework, and "seamless" updates that supposedly bug the user less)

Also, split-screen and "picture-in-picture" modes for viewing multiple apps at once.

And they've released a "beta quality" public release for Android N that runs on the usual list of Nexus devices.

Next-gen virtual reality - Google Daydream

- New phone specs ("Daydream-ready"): sensor latency, framerate, etc. "Several will be available this fall."

- "VR mode" (drags all sorts of Android things into the VR world, even notifications)

- headsets (new reference design, much nicer than the original Cardboard thing)

- a "controller" that looks a bit like an AppleTV thing, which you can point around, etc.

Not really sure I see any actual reason to want this.

Android Wear 2.0 (which I kinda care about since I've got my hobby project that runs on Wear):

- "Any watchface can show data from any app" -- this is going to be complicated. Apps provide "complications" that render inside a face.

- Oh boy, they've got a teeny tiny keyboard as well as handwriting recognition so you can reply to texts without needing to pull out your phone.

- Apps can (finally!) talk directly to the network, rather than needing an on-phone companion proxy app.

Android dev tools: nothing much that hasn't come out beforehand. It's curious how they're pushing on this Firebase thing -- an infrastructure for messaging, analytics, and more.

"Android Instant Apps" -- oh the security nightmare! I can send you a URL. You click on it. In a single click, you're all the way into the app that you didn't install. My eyes hurt!

OH CRAP! It runs on ancient phones, like all the way back to Android Jellybean! Those phones are chock-full of security holes.

Oh boy, where to begin...


I'd like to amend your equation because Chromecast was already like Sonos, but I get your point. The only problem I have is that Chromecasting needs a ton of work. The reliability I've experienced has been pitiful, IMO, especially with multi-room audio. When it works, it's fantastic. But one of my Chromecast Audio devices is constantly cutting out or getting lost, and Google Play Music will almost always tell me I've been disconnected from the Chromecast after little more than 10 minutes. It's exceedingly frustrating.


Yeah, everything can do this now. My question is: what are they using? Is it just API's to talk to other mostly-closed systems? Is it one of those things where it'll work with Nest and Hue and a couple of the other most popular devices, but never a complete system? And what is the interface for this? Voice only? So if I'm on the other side of the house, I have to use the individual apps for those automation devices? Ugh, don't get me started on the state of home automation. IMO, it's a total disaster right now.

Also, I'm now assuming that Android@Home is done. Right? They named this new project "Home," which seems to put that to bed. I'd also hoped that this was the sort of thing that would be added to the OnHub products that Google has been making. It has a microphone and a speaker, but who knows why!?


Yeah, that's stupid. Who cares? The vast majority of users don't even know any of these names. Just pick an "N" sweet and move on.


There'd better be performance fixes and not just improvements. My Nexus 5X has been a disaster, but I'll start another thread about that...


I've completely given up voice dictation on my gen 1 Moto 360. I have no idea why, but while it was pretty good at first, it's become 100% unusable in recent months. It'll completely miss-hear me, and even when I try again and try to enunciate perfectly, it still totally messes up. Recently, I tried sending a simple four digit number to myself. I said something like "OK Google, note to self 4628." I tried it three times, and every time it heard the number with a 0 in front of it. I have no clue why.

Sorry, I realize I'm venting on some of these issues, but I've been having a really hard time keeping the Google faith when every Google product around me is malfunctioning.

Ah, I'm not the only one experiencing these problems?

I have two chromecasts and half the time my Chromecast apps have trouble locating them as being visible on the network. I even got the newer models recently and I'm still having intermittent troubles.

Therein lies the devil.

How does one debug a houseful of 'smart things' that sometimes work and sometimes do not?

Where is the balance going to be between having more of these things and having more troubles precisely because you have more of them?

Will we require a 'smart things monitoring service' just to keep it all working and advise on what to do when it does not work? Who will create and run such a service, and how will they be paid?

You are not the only one, I suppose. I haven't investigated how common these problems are, but I can't imagine we're alone.

I've also had your problem where the devices around found. When I tap the Chromecast icon, the option that comes up the least often is the grouped Chromecast option. Sometimes I'll have to close and reopen the device selection window for them all to appear, or at least wait around 5 seconds. I almost never have all options show up immediately.

The frustrating part to me is that Everything in the chain is Google. I'm using my Nexus 5X through an OnHub router to my Chromecasts. I only have the most recent Chromecast and two Chromecast Audios. I can't imagine a more ideal setup, but it just doesn't work well enough.

I'd appreciate a link if anyone's seen more information on this question, but does Google Home distinguish between users? If I ask it what is on my calendar, and then my wife does the same, will it give two different results? I have to assume they planned for that. It would be pretty useless as a family device if it could only tie to one person's account...

Well that saves me the purchase of an OnHub to try to solve the problem. :-)

Lol, yeah I guess so. It's still a great router, though. Fantastic range.

Well, my 2nd-gen Chromecast is ~1 meter away from my Apple Airport Extreme and works like a champ, much better than the 1st-gen Chromecast I previously had in the same location, which had various issues.

I should be clear that my Chromecast has no issues at all. It's the Chromecast Audio devices on my network that are giving me the problems I've been talking about. No, the regular Chromecast is awesome... but I still find myself using my Roku exclusively, because I simply cannot stand using my phone as a remote control.

Android N "preview" feature of note: the "constrained layout manager" is a thing of beauty. See around 6:00 minutes into the what's new in Android video. I've worked with all sorts of UI toolkits in the past, and nothing comes close to how awesome this is.

I'm more excited about some of those UI changes than I thought I'd be. While I can only think of one occasion when I would use the feature to have two apps open at once (copying shopping list items my wife sends me into Google Keep), I guess I could find other uses. I do like being able to choose my own layout of the quick settings shade.

I wish Google would do some more work on the share menu. It's slightly better than it used to be, but still pretty messy.

Listening to a podcast discussing this, it seems at the keynote they didn't indicate if the video preview will be limited to people in your contacts or not. If it's not, well Google might be going for first place in the TTP competition. (NSFW warning on that link for words mentioning human anatomy.)

So nobody knows if the Google Home can distinguish two different voices and match their accounts? Seems odd that they didn't mention this in the announcement. I don't even know if the Echo works this way.

Certainly, this is a deal-killer if anybody can walk into my house and say "Ok Google, buy me X" and that actually works.

Certainly. But for me it's also a deal killer if my wife asks "OK Google, what's on my schedule for tomorrow?" and she doesn't get anything or she gets my schedule.

I have to assume that it'll take multiple accounts. They show the couple in the video requesting information from what I would assume would be their individual calendars, but I'm not sure. The wife asks for information about her flight, but that could be on a shared calendar. The husband asks about that school thing at the end, and that seems like something that would definitely be on a shared calendar. So maybe you have to add specific calendars to it? I don't know, I think the devil's in the details on this one, and all they showed was a theoretical demo. I have my doubts that it'll work the way they showed it.