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. “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. Rick Osterloh, head of Google’s new hardware group, suggested as much when he said Google decided to build hardware so the company can “get things done without worrying about the underlying tech.” In this instance, “get things done” means deliver a rich AI experience---something Google's spent the better part of its existence preparing for. “The way to get the AI in front of you is to embody it in hardware,” says Jon Mann, an interaction designer at Artefact. “If I want to stream music to speakers in my living room, that’s multiple steps I have to take, and I have to work through discovering the trigger points on the app,” Mann says.