Home
Internet
Internet Features
Google's Rishi Chandra on Home, Assistant, and Everything Else in Between

Google's Rishi Chandra on Home, Assistant, and Everything Else in Between

By Kunal Dua | Updated: 12 January 2017 15:01 IST

Google announced the Google Home voice-controlled speaker, and Google Assistant, the virtual assistant that powers the speaker, at its annual developers conference last year. Apart from Home, the Google Assistant lives inside Google Allo - a chat app unveiled at the same time - and is also integrated with Google Pixel phones that the search giant unveiled with much fanfare last October.

While Google Home may not officially be available in India yet, many believe that products like Home and assistants powered by Amazon’s Alexa - which was the star of the show at last week’s CES - represent the future of computing. Gadgets 360 was in Mountain View recently to meet some of the key people behind Google Assistant and Google Home, and we got a chance to chat with Rishi Chandra, Vice President, Product Management at Google.

Chandra is the man leading Google’s hardware efforts for the home, including products such as Chromecast, OnHub, and, of course Google Home itself, and in our chat, he touched upon a wide variety of topics, including working with multiple teams within Google while developing Home, some of the recent confusion around branding of Google Home apps, and a whole lot more. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

Gadgets 360: So the first question is a bit of an existential question - where does the line between Assistant and Home begin and end? Is the Home project about designing a speaker?
Rishi Chandra: Yes so, I think it’s a fair question. I guess, we think of ourselves as one team, like it’s collaboration between the two teams that are developing the product. So I think what the hardware itself can contribute, right, to the experience is obviously we design the hardware, like the form factor itself, and making sure that were able to kinda get the microphones that we need to get, and a speaker quality, and make sure the audio is amazing in terms of how you interface with the Assistant itself.

But the way I look at it is, it’s a single product, with multiple teams - actually Assistant team is not the only one - we collaborated with YouTube team, for example, on this, so the Maps team, for a few bunch of capabilities. So, this is really a kinda a cross-Google effort to actually make the product work really well.

But I think the advantages of having a fully integrated product is [that] we can design the hardware in a way that's optimised to reflect the software, and vice versa. I think you'll see this [Google Home] is a first rev of this, you’ll see more and more as we try to get a more kinda awareness of how you interact with these devices. That will become more and more critical over time. I think we are in the very early stages of how this thing can understand you.

There are complaints that if you have an Android device lying around Home, and you say ‘OK Google’ [the phrase that triggers Assistant], there's a conflict in that both devices respond. So how's that going to be solved?
Actually so what we have done, particularly for this feedback, is so if you have the same user account across the different devices, actually only one will respond. So we've optimised it so that depending on where you are interfacing with the Google Assistant it will smartly know 'Ok wait, you're probably talking to your phone’, it will only answer from your phone.

So if my phone is just lying around here..
Yeah, if you have the same account on both, only one will respond back to you.

And which one would that be?
It depends on the context of the query. So basically like if, for example, your phone is open and it's like right in front of you, then we’ll optimise for the phone experience. If your phone is down and laying down, we’ll probably go to the far field.

So this is now an algorithm we're still tuning, the heuristics are fairly basic right now, but the ideal thing should be you should not have to think, right, about it - we should understand based on the context you are in what device actually makes more sense to respond back to you. So when I say ‘Play music’, probably this [points to Google Home] is a device that you should be playing music on. If I'm asking for a Web result and I have my phone open, then I probably want it on my phone.

With the apps that you have, there's been lot of re-branding: Chromecast, Google Cast, Google Home. What's happening there
So, it's a fair question. I think, it's definitely disruptive, umm, but as we evolve our strategy into really the Assistant is going to be the lead, and Home will be the lead brand around all the different devices we're gonna have, that's how we ended up landing with Google Home.

The history of this is when we launched Chromecast, we always said Chromecast is gonna be one device that had the Cast protocol, right, that allows you to actually use your phone to interact with it. So we rebranded [to] Google Cast last year as part of that original effort, which is like, ok, Google Cast is a much broader wider ecosystem play that we have around the casting capability.

But as we [were] developing Google Home, we felt like Google Home under the Cast app brand didn't make sense, and actually Google Home was a better top-level brand to actually associate all our products around and the ecosystem products around as well. So, it's just an unfortunate timing of like when kinda strategically, when we made the bet of like Google Home's gonna be the future bet that we're gonna make and the branding around it that it kinda caused some churn over the last two years. I’m happy to say we’re gonna land on this for some time, so you don't have to worry about it changing anytime soon.

To take your example [from earlier in the chat], if you ask Home to search for something on YouTube, you say the video that plays may not necessarily be the one you’d see on top of YouTube search results on your computer. Why is that?
Let’s just say it's optimised for the use-case, right. So, for example, umm on a TV, a short form like 10-second video may not be the right answer for that context versus a long form. Like if you’re doing it on a phone and you're doing search results, the search results right now are optimised for the service [device] that they are on. So what had to do is optimise effectively the surface for watching a long-form video TV.

So apart from duration, what else - could quality be a signal, what else?
That's exactly right. So quality could be a signal, umm there's like a bunch of signals umm, PC quality, the video the length and duration of video, the type of entity that you might have on the video, so what YouTube’s trying to understand is that on a phone when you're searching for something what's the type of thing you actually wanna watch, versus on a TV.

Like SNL may mean something - this is not a good example, I don't have an example on the top of my head - but certain things I guess SNL, Saturday Night Live is what you really mean on TV and maybe something else on a mobile phone. So, anyway, we're just tuning the algorithm so that we're doing the right thing on these different devices. And so, sometimes, by the way, it may mean that the bar for the top result is higher.

So let me get it the other way. Today when we [show] 10 results on YouTube, the bar you decide for the first one, second one, third on, could be like you can mix heuristics there, but on TV it's much higher bar, so we just have to apply different filtering and mechanisms on how we actually decide what top results are gonna be. These are all learned, these are all trained algorithms, right, so in the end each surface will have its trained algorithm that [it’s] gonna use.

Note that we’ve expanded some of the questions to make their context clear to our readers, but Rishi Chandra’s answers are produced as is, without any edits.

Disclosure: Google sponsored the correspondent’s flights and hotel in Mountain View for the event.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.