Technology The 'Everything Google that isn't Android' thread

[THEV1LL4N]

Any indication of a YouTube Red release date in the UK and some pricing?

It would be great if they priced it similar to Netflix (about £6 per month) so that it's a direct competitor for video services. That would make it an excellent deal with Google Play Music included. Or, probably even better still, for people that just want YouTube Red, they can pay for that, but those who want the Play Music as well can pay as an add-on making it like £10 (which is what I think it will cost per person, per month) - thus allowing people to build their packages and have only what they need.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

So, what are people expecting from Google I/O this year?

I'm hoping for:

• an introduction of YouTube Red to the UK. I heard it is coming to Australia soon - so maybe a global rollout is on the cards.
• More range of Nexus tablets and Chromebooks (rumours about a new Nexus 7, hopefully even a Nexus 8 and 9).
• More info about Android N
• Some sort of major improvement or rebranding of Hangouts. I don't feel like anyone uses it anymore since it became Hangouts.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

I've just read this:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/0...podcasts-are-apparently-coming-on-april-18th/

So now it's reminded me that I'd also like advancements in the Google Play Music area. I'd like the free ad-supported radio service to be made available here in the UK as well. This will be interesting and it may have a SoundCloud type experience, but probably without the user profile page and only artist/author pages.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

http://officialandroid.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/welcome-to-google-play-music-podcast.html

So Podcasts are confirmed but remain US and Canada only for now...

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Thoughts on the upcoming YouTube Music rebrand that merges YouTube Music and Google Play Music?

Apple Music is set to take top spot for the number of active subscribers in the US - with Spotify still being the most dominant worldwide.

Are Google late to the game, or are they going to shake things up and announce themselves as a major player and a real threat to the duopoly?


My biggest concern for the new YouTube music service is that it may be confusing for users as they are stuck in their audio-only services and happy with what they already know and are familiar with.
YouTube absolutely, have to make their service social like Spotify where users can subscribe to playlists, post and share listening trends with their social groups. Spotify are now doing their own charts thing like Last.fm.

Amazon Music are ditching their cloud service to direct users towards paid subscriptions, and this leaves me wondering what Google are planning to do. They really need to push their music service and advertise it on TV, radio, newspapers, internet etc if they are serious about being competitive and offer a freemium tier as well.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

I also think that YouTube could have had a piece of the pie with a Snapchat competitor (disappearing video-sharing social service).

 

[THEV1LL4N]

What do people think of the YouTube Music rebrand? I just wish they would launch it in the UK from the very start.

 

[Pittsey]

Everyone's got a Google home right?

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Everyone's got a Google home right?

I actually don't have one. I wanted to get the Google Home Mini, but I'm waiting to see if there is a refresh - but I'm also considering getting a smart speaker that has Google Assistant built-in. I'll probably see what my options are when upgrading my phone hopefully around the time the Pixel 3 is due for release (last year they bundled the Google Home Mini for free with pre-orders of the Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL).

 

[masta247]

Everyone's got a Google home right?

The first project I did after moving was actually QA for voice recognition of accents for all personal assistants, including Google's. After it was done, I kept one Google Home that I ended up leaving at my old home. I just didn't use it. I don't think I'll find one to be useful for a while.

 

[k69atie]

Everyone's got a Google home right?

Nope

 

[dilla]

The first project I did after moving was actually QA for voice recognition of accents for all personal assistants, including Google's. After it was done, I kept one Google Home that I ended up leaving at my old home. I just didn't use it. I don't think I'll find one to be useful for a while.

My dad makes a lot of phone calls to the hospital since he's on-call almost every night. I was thinking that putting a Home Mini (~$30) in his room would help him out a bit. Since they call at all odd hours, sometimes, I thought he could always lay in bed and say "OK, Google, call Hospital" and have that contact saved to dial directly to the department he needs. Because Google Home can make calls via Google Voice or Gmail, right? You can say "OK, Google, call Royal Garden in Chicago" to call a Chinese place and place an order through the Home Mini.

 

[masta247]

My dad makes a lot of phone calls to the hospital since he's on-call almost every night. I was thinking that putting a Home Mini (~$30) in his room would help him out a bit. Since they call at all odd hours, sometimes, I thought he could always lay in bed and say "OK, Google, call Hospital" and have that contact saved to dial directly to the department he needs. Because Google Home can make calls via Google Voice or Gmail, right? You can say "OK, Google, call Royal Garden in Chicago" to call a Chinese place and place an order through the Home Mini.

To me it just wasn't reliable for that. I wouldn't trust that it would actually call the right person/place/number. I was annoyed at the amount of mistakes the thing would make, and the amount of features that I expected to be there, that weren't. At my home it was a one trick pony for checking the weather, that I have on my phone's main screen anyway. It always felt easier to just press a few buttons to do the same thing. For information, I much prefer visual cues rather than voice. I know a lot of people like Google Home, but to me it's still very, very far from being useful. I sure do hope for the best in the future.

 

[k69atie]

The only thing they are any good for is telling them to add a bag of dildos to someones amazon order which seems to be the only thing i say that they understand 1st time

 

[masta247]

I really hope to see the day there is an actual developed AI behind Google Home and the likes.

At the moment there are hundreds of hours of engineering work just to make it understand a single new sentence or command, which are basically predefined, coded queries that have their pre-defined answers/scripted clicks added to the database. The "human-like" texts are also pre-coded and scripted, written by Google engineers. Each new sentence that it understands takes a lot of voice samples for each way a person can ask to receive that given answer, and then QA. Everything else that was "not pre-scripted" is just a redirection to Google, where the voice recognition just inputs your words into a Google search. It's very primitive and ages from being anything better than that. There is nothing smart about Google home - from my perspective, it is unimpressive as is, very time consuming to improve, and the whole engine is just very basic code with a database of pre-defined actions as answers and a 'work-in-progress' voice recognition that is being marketed as a smart assistant. Considering new tricks are just new scripts, it hardly has anything to do with the AI we've been waiting for.

And then the "machine learning" thing - the only thing it "learns" is related to voice recognition, where it basically extrapolates the thousands of real-life voice samples it's fed into understanding the same words pronounced by other people who might sound a bit different. It also tries to filters the results by trying to primitively narrow it down to the ones you are most likely to ask for based on your location history, places most frequently chosen in the area, etc.

Hopefully the popularity leads to continuous development of machine learning and real AI engines that might pop up someday in the future. If Google Home is the very beginning of that path, I am happy that it's popular. But at the moment there is no AI there and the machine learning behind it is not even in its infancy - it's barely there at all. It's basically the "Hello World" of machine learning. After it's light years from the very beginnings that we see today, we might start talking about useful assistants and having something genuinely cool, at least in my book.

 

[k69atie]

I just don't see the point to them

Just pure lazyness

 

[dilla]

I really hope to see the day there is an actual developed AI behind Google Home and the likes.

At the moment there are hundreds of hours of engineering work just to make it understand a single new sentence or command, which are basically predefined, coded queries that have their pre-defined answers/scripted clicks added to the database. The "human-like" texts are also pre-coded and scripted, written by Google engineers. Each new sentence that it understands takes a lot of voice samples for each way a person can ask to receive that given answer, and then QA. Everything else that was "not pre-scripted" is just a redirection to Google, where the voice recognition just inputs your words into a Google search. It's very primitive and ages from being anything better than that. There is nothing smart about Google home - from my perspective, it is unimpressive as is, very time consuming to improve, and the whole engine is just very basic code with a database of pre-defined actions as answers and a 'work-in-progress' voice recognition that is being marketed as a smart assistant. Considering new tricks are just new scripts, it hardly has anything to do with the AI we've been waiting for.

And then the "machine learning" thing - the only thing it "learns" is related to voice recognition, where it basically extrapolates the thousands of real-life voice samples it's fed into understanding the same words pronounced by other people who might sound a bit different. It also tries to filters the results by trying to primitively narrow it down to the ones you are most likely to ask for based on your location history, places most frequently chosen in the area, etc.

Hopefully the popularity leads to continuous development of machine learning and real AI engines that might pop up someday in the future. If Google Home is the very beginning of that path, I am happy that it's popular. But at the moment there is no AI there and the machine learning behind it is not even in its infancy - it's barely there at all. It's basically the "Hello World" of machine learning. After it's light years from the very beginnings that we see today, we might start talking about useful assistants and having something genuinely cool, at least in my book.

Are all smart home devices more or less the same? If Google Home isn't there, what about Alexa or Apple's Homekit/Homepod, whatever it's called?

I would imagine Google Home was the best out there, solely based on Google Assistant on Android being light years ahead of Apple's Siri. Is it really that inaccurate? I dictate texts and messages using medical terms all the time and Google gets it right 90%+ of the time. Same with telling Google to call a specific establishment in a certain town, and not the one 50 miles away.

I haven't asked it to purchase anything for me, like a lot of the Alexa ads show, and I don't think I'd do that until that service became very reliable, but for everything I else I feel Google is pretty spot-on.

 

[masta247]

Are all smart home devices more or less the same? If Google Home isn't there, what about Alexa or Apple's Homekit/Homepod, whatever it's called?

I would imagine Google Home was the best out there, solely based on Google Assistant on Android being light years ahead of Apple's Siri. Is it really that inaccurate? I dictate texts and messages using medical terms all the time and Google gets it right 90%+ of the time. Same with telling Google to call a specific establishment in a certain town, and not the one 50 miles away.

I haven't asked it to purchase anything for me, like a lot of the Alexa ads show, and I don't think I'd do that until that service became very reliable, but for everything I else I feel Google is pretty spot-on.

At the moment Google is actually the best out there, probably Alexa being second due to Amazon being full on serious about machine learning just as Google is. They hire tens of thousands of people for voice samples, then the engineers "teach" the machines about which text matches which recorded word, and each word has hundreds of samples for it, with different accents and intonations. That part we got partially covered, albeit with ridiculous resources to make voice recognition happen the way it is covered. Still, the text that you say out loud is still pretty much inputted into a google search field as if it was typed.

Sure, Google search employs basic machine learning too, and it is a very, very advanced search algorithm behind it now too, but it is millions of hours of engineering time and a lot of simple code, not AI. If you type "Donuts in Boston" in Google you will get the locations for donuts there because a lot of human effort was made to make that happen - it is an algorithm that the engineers have been improving for years now. Medical terms aren't in any way more complicated than donuts to a computer if the voice recognition got a voice sample for that too. It doesn't know what an appendix is or what a donut is, it's equally easy as long as some engineers matched the text with the sound before.

The main point is, the tech is really simple - it's not anything like what we would expect from AI, despite it being called that. There's no "understanding" happening on the machine's part. Instead, it's basically brute forcing and putting insane resources into making it resemble a very, very basic one from a regular user's perspective.

 

[Casey]

I love my Google Home.

I have two of them and they are connected to my Nest thermostat and my Hue lightbulbs.

It's like living in The Jetsons.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

YouTube Music and YouTube Premium officially launched today, and to my surprise in the UK as well (because they didn't mention anything about a UK release just yet).

It looks good so far and will be better once they migrate data and playlists over from Play Music.

After a quick browse, there's one thing I don't like though, which is that some song titles are named after the video titles - it doesn't look consistent. But generally, they seem to have executed this whole thing very well.

Once they integrate more stuff in and hopefully gain some traction/popularity, it will be an exciting three-horse race.