The Assistant: Google's AI at I/O

On Tuesday, Google opened its annual developer conference with a bet on the future, and the bet was artificial intelligence. The company unveiled Google Assistant, a conversational system built on everything Google knows, and a home speaker called Google Home that puts the assistant in the living room. The announcements came at I/O, the company's annual gathering of developers, held this year in an outdoor amphitheater in Mountain View. The conference is the May 2016 story, and the story is the lesson: the platform wars moved from the phone to the assistant, and Google arrived with the biggest data advantage in the world.

The Assistant is the subject of this article: what Google announced, how the assistant works, why the home speaker matters, and what the shift from mobile first to AI first means for the company and the industry. The conference ran from May 18 to May 20, and the announcements were made on the first day. This is the story of the assistant, and the story is about the moment the voice became the interface.

1. The Conference

Google I/O is the company's annual meeting with the developers who build the ecosystem, and the 2016 edition was held outdoors at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View. Around seven thousand developers gathered in the sun to hear what the company would build next, and the setting was a statement: the biggest company in the web was going back to its roots with the people who make the web work. The conference was the stage, and the stage was the biggest in the industry.

The conference had a new leader at the center of it. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, opened the keynote, and his presence was the confirmation that the company's direction was his direction. The keynote ran for two hours, and the announcements covered the phone, the home, the messenger, and the virtual reality headset. The conference was the beginning of the story, and the story was about the next platform.

2. The Assistant

The centerpiece of the conference was Google Assistant, and the assistant was a new way of thinking about the company's oldest product. Google had spent years building Google Now, the cards that anticipated what users needed, and the assistant was the next step: a system that could hold a conversation, understand context, and carry out tasks across the whole of Google's services. The assistant was built for two-way dialogue, the ability to ask a question, get an answer, and ask a follow-up.

The assistant was the answer to a simple question: what comes after the search box? The search box was the interface of the desktop, and the phone had brought voice, and the assistant was the interface of the next decade. The assistant combined Google's search engine, its knowledge graph, its maps, its mail, and its calendar into a single conversational layer. The assistant was the platform, and the platform was the future of the company.

3. The Speaker

The hardware that showed the assistant off was Google Home, and the speaker was the surprise of the keynote. Home was a voice activated speaker designed for the living room, a device that could answer questions, control music, and manage the connected home, all through the assistant. The device looked like a small white cylinder, and the look was the point: the hardware was meant to disappear into the room, and the intelligence was meant to be everywhere.

The speaker was Google's answer to the Amazon Echo, the voice speaker that had been building a following since late 2015. The Echo had shown that the living room was the next battleground, and Google arrived with the assistant that knew more about the world than any rival. The speaker was not just a product; it was the declaration that the voice race was on, and the declaration was made with the strongest hand in the industry.

4. The Messengers

The conference also brought two new apps, and the apps were the assistant wearing different clothes. Allo was a messaging app with the assistant built in: users could chat with friends, and they could summon the assistant into the conversation to book a table, look up a fact, or make a plan. Duo was a video calling app, and the trick of Duo was Knock Knock, a feature that showed the caller's live video before the call was answered.

The messengers were part of the assistant strategy, and the strategy was about presence. Google's messaging history was a graveyard of apps, and the company was trying again with the assistant as the differentiator: the reason to use Google's messenger instead of the others was that the messenger could do things no other messenger could do. The messengers were the distribution for the assistant, and the distribution was the point.

5. The Platform

The deeper announcement was about the platform, and the platform was called Daydream. Google unveiled Daydream, a virtual reality platform for Android, with a reference design for headsets and controllers that phone makers could build on. The company was betting that the phone in everyone's pocket could become the screen of the next computing platform, and that the platform needed a standard to grow.

The platform announcement was a lesson in Google's method: make the software, set the standard, and let the hardware makers fight over the boxes. The same method had built Android, and the same method was being applied to virtual reality. The platform was the long game, and the long game was the company's specialty. The platform was the bet on the next interface, and the bet was announced in the sun.

6. The AI First

The conference was the official beginning of Google's AI first era, and the phrase was used more than once. Pichai had been pushing the company toward artificial intelligence since taking over, and the keynote was the public version of the shift: every product, every service, and every platform would be rebuilt around machine learning. The assistant was the face of the shift, and the face was friendly.

The shift was visible in the details. The photo app recognized faces and objects, the mail app suggested replies, and the keyboard learned from its users, all through the machine learning that Google had spent years building. The company's advantage was the data: the largest search engine, the largest video service, the largest maps, the largest mail service, all feeding the models. The AI first was the strategy, and the strategy was the data.

7. The Competition

The competition was the subtext of the conference, and the subtext was the voice war. Apple had Siri, the first of the assistants, and Microsoft had Cortana, and Amazon had Echo and Alexa, and the race was on. The conference was Google's declaration that it would not be the follower in the voice era, and the declaration was backed by the deepest understanding of the world that any company had.

The competition was also about the home, the car, and the wrist, the places where the next computing happened. The phone was the center of the world, and the center was shifting: the assistant would follow the user from the phone to the speaker to the car, and the company that owned the assistant would own the relationship. The competition was the context, and the context was the race.

8. The Lesson

The lesson of the conference is about the power of the default position, and the power is the same in the voice era as it was in the search era. The assistant that users meet first, the assistant that answers the questions, the assistant that lives in the home, becomes the assistant they keep. Google understood the lesson because Google had built its empire on being the default answer to the world's questions, and the assistant was the answer machine rebuilt for the new interface.

The lesson is also about the value of the long game. The conference announced products that were not shipping yet, and the announcements were the beginning of a journey that would take years. The company was building for the decade ahead, and the decade ahead was the point. The conference is the May 2016 story, and the story is the lesson: the platform wars moved from the phone to the assistant, and the company with the most data and the longest patience arrived with the strongest hand. The assistant was the future, and the future was announced on Tuesday. The race that began that day is now being run in every company that builds software: the race to own the conversation. The companies that will win it are the ones that understand that the assistant is not a feature and is a platform, and that platforms are won by the data behind them and the patience in front of them. The developers left the amphitheater with the sense that the company had turned a corner, and the corner was the assistant. The announcements were the beginning of the company's most important decade, and the beginning was visible in the sun that day. The assistant was the first word of a long conversation. The sun set on the amphitheater, and the future rose in its place.

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