Google I/O, Android O, and Assistant on the iPhone

Fresh out of my export folder is a brand new episode of The Vergecast. This week, because of the business that is Google I/O, we recorded our episode Friday morning. This resulted in Nilay’s attempt to bring a morning show vibe to episode 257, despite Dieter, Adi, Natt, and Paul’s (and my) disapproval of sound effects. There was a lot to discuss thanks to Google’s developer conference, so here it is! Enjoy! 06:43 - Google is finally replacing its bad emoji blobs in Android O 13:59 - Google Assistant is on the iPhone now 24:41 - Google wants the Assistant to be everywhere — but first it needs to conquer the iPhone 31:46 - Android O 37:40 - Google is adding Kotlin as an official programming language for Android development 45:37 - Google AR / VR 1:01:25 - Ford update brings Android Auto and Apple CarPlay to its 2016 fleet 1:06:50 - New Surface Pro leak confirms Microsoft's hatred for USB-C 1:07:28 - AMD is bringing its new Ryzen processors to laptops later this year 1:08:15 - FCC votes to begin overturning net neutrality Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, which is just our website, but we have all these other things, too.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  We have an Instagram.

• 0:14Nilay Patel?

  The flagship podcast of youtube.com/theverge. How's that? It's a big week. We got all kinds of things going on. I want to jump right into it. No inside jokes, no nonsense. Uh, Paul Miller is here. Hello, Paul.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  Nak Aaron is here.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  It's me.

• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bone and Addy Robertson are together in San Francisco because Addy is at Google I/O. What's up, guys?

• 0:35Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  We got a full boat. The flagship is full.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Step it over. Help. Can you have a flagship in an armada of one podcast?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  Is that allowed?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It's just by definition, the flagship.

• 0:49Nilay Patel?

  Do you have ideas for podcasts? There's some kinds of podcasts I want to do. I think we should do a culture podcast. I want Casey to do something. Uh, but you know, Walt's podcast is winding down, so we're going to be down to one. So we need more. So if you, if you, the listener, have ideas for them, let us know. I'm very curious what you guys want out of... And you can't just be like, I want Vlad. Like, I'll get... You get Vlad. I promise. So get Vlad. But we need like a show idea. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Tell us about like an unsolved mystery.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  What if Vlad's show is headphones on headphones? And you have to listen to it with headphones?

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  It's just the sound of Vlad wearing more and more headphones over time.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  And every, every episode ends with like a test tone? So you can test the quality of the headphones that you're using?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  This seems like more like a weird asthma sort of livestream thing. Like you just keep it on all the time? It's not a podcast.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just a sound. Uh, no, I mean, like, I'm saying, I love Vlad. I want Vlad to be more involved in everything we do. But like, there were... When you give me a podcast request, you can't just request people. I want, like, what do you want the show to be about? But send them to me because I'm really interested. I don't think we should just have one podcast.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I love that you thought we were going to start not having inside jokes and that we forced you to doing nothing but talk about Verge stuff for the first three minutes of this podcast.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, here's the real inside joke of the whole show. I've been thinking about this all night and I'm saying all night specifically because it is now morning. We usually record this show on Thursday afternoons, but it's 10 a.m. when we're recording on Friday here in the East Coast. For Addy and Dieter, it is 7 a.m. on the West Coast. So we got a real morning Zoo Crew vibe.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  I got a whole, I got a whole soundboard here.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, don't even.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  So you're saying in the time since Thursday afternoon till right now, 10 a.m. Eastern, you've been working on this, the Zoo, Zoo Crew reference?

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's all I've been doing.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  No, I've been finding soundboards.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  So, please be warned that I might, I might be making sound effects the entire show. But anyway, look, none of that is important. What is important is Google AI. So, Addy, Dieter, you're there. Nat, you've been running our coverage on the, on the East Coast. Dieter, you wrote, I think, the big, the big piece out of it about assistant and what's happening with AI. Addy, you've been, you've been talking about what they're doing in VR, which seems also very foundational. But Dieter, I want to start with you. What, what's the gestalt of Google right now? What's their vibe?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  They are very chill. The whole event was also very chill. Like, everyone's like, what's going on? They're like, yeah, you know, we're just doing our stuff. We're just, you know, took all the stuff we had last year and we're making it better this year. And you would, you'd walk around, like, they call it the sandbox. I don't know. That's just because it's a developer conference. I don't know, whatever. It's a joke, a developer joke. But it's, they have it at the-

• 3:48Speaker 03

  It's a parking lot of domes.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  It's a parking lot of domes. They have it at the, the Shoreline Amphitheater, an outdoor theater amphitheater. And then there's a giant parking lot zone that they fill up sort of like a, like a county fair, but it's filled with like weird domes and giant tents. And this year they added about 30% more shade and 50% more air conditioning so nobody would die of heat stroke. Although there was a kitchen fire that apparently injured somebody yesterday.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  I feel so bad for missing the fire.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was not there when that happened. I was, I was off at the Google campus doing Google things. Anyway, I, it was not a huge giant crowd. Like, I went to places and like, there were like, obviously, you know, thousands of people. I think it was 7,000 people, which is maybe is more than they ever had before, who knows? But you would walk into one of these little domes and I would go around, all right, I'm gonna go find some stuff to take video of for Circuit Breaker. And I'd walk in and it would be eight people standing around little tiny booths in Google shirts and nobody else. And I would walk in and they would turn around and look at me and go, hi! I'd be like, huh? Hi guys.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  And I would I would I would Homer Simpson into the hedge out of the dome to go to the next one to see what was going on.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  This sounds like the worst marketing campaign for the circle ever.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  You're actually in a David Cronenberg movie.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but like to me, that was, I mean, they got busy, like, the domes got busy a little bit later. But like, if you showed up at like, you know, 10:00 in the morning at one of these domes, it was just like, there was, everybody was out at a session or like, chilling. It was just a lot of like, general chilling. And the news itself was generally, I don't know, chilling, not terrifying chilling, maybe a little chilling.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  The keynote was literally chilling to my body.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  It was cold.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I know I have been complaining about this, but it's because it actively impeded my ability to work because my hands were so stiff.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't. So our copy editor, Cara Verlady, I do not envy her because I, when I was trying to live blog, literally, which just gave up not making typos because my right pinky finger was so cold, I couldn't feel it. It was like 60, you know, whatever, but it was breezy. And so I couldn't arrow key over to fix typos because I couldn't feel where my pinky finger was. And so I just said, fuck it and hit enter like over and over and over again.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  So you're saying next year, instead of giving out sunscreens, they should give out blankets and gloves?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Next year, yeah, I'm just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get buy a pair of fingerless gloves. That's, that's what's gonna happen.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  I feel like more a heating pad. If I had a heating pad, sort of around my hand, maybe.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Was that, was that, is that an accurate description of the vibe at I O this year?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  It was very chill. It's which sort of made it onto the site where everything is like, Google was kind of boring this year, but that's actually really good.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Vlad wrote a piece that's like, it's time for Google to be boring. And then they were like.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  They did it.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, after you.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  We heard you.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  But some of the stuff isn't boring, right? I want to start with where Nat wants to start. They're changing the emoji in Android. Which I think is like.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  This is a big deal to me.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  Honestly, the biggest news at Google I O is that you don't have to deal with the blobs anymore.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  Wait, hold on. I love the blobs.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  You love the blobs?

• 6:57Speaker 05

  I might be in the minority here, but I love the blobs. I'm very upset they're going away. It's very bittersweet.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Why? Wait, why do you love the blobs?

• 7:04Speaker 05

  Because there's so, I don't know, there, there's so much character in them. And like, beyond the blobs, even the animals are changing. Like, the cat now looks like a tiger, which I'm not a fan of.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  All cats are tigers.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Well, you know, like before it was like a really cute kitten looking thing and now it's like this weird striped thing, which I don't really see as a cat. Anyway, and also like the clown somehow managed to look even more menacing than before, which is terrifying. Not a fan. But anyway, I miss the blobs. I'm gonna like, they were cute and they look like adorable little things. And now the new one is just like generic and round and I don't know, probably on par with how bad Samsung's emojis are. And that's pretty bad.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  This is a part of like an ongoing thing for me that makes me really unsettled by emojis. One thing that a company of like multi-billion dollar company can add to my vocabulary, but that they can now like change my inflection in this, you know, like the, we've redesigned your language now.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  So this is what your words look like.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Right. It's crazy how emotionally tied people are to these emojis. It's just like, at the end of the day, it's just like a bunch of frickin icons, but like people had legit feels about these things changing.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  The thing that gets me though, is that if what it looks like on your phone is not necessarily what the person that you're sending it to sees.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, it's weird because they're redesigning your language, but they're also redesigning what people are saying to you. So if an iOS user sends you an emoji, before they were like, they, I assume most people think they're, you receive what you send. Right? But now it's.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  You do not. Well, it's, it's, it's been like that way for a while. So this is, this is a problem with the, the grimace, right? Like on some phones, the grimace actually looks like a smile. And this is a particular problem on Samsung phones. So while I don't have.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Samsung grimace is the worst.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I don't have any particular affinity for the blobs. I actually don't hate hate them. I think they're fine. I think they do have like, they're, they're like, they're like, because they're trying to look like the Android robot, they've got these like cute fat little necks, basically. They're just, they're just, the, the Android blobs are just, they're really jowly, right? Like a jowly emoji is cute.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  I mean, I just, I think I think of emoji totally differently from this, that when I'm in Slack, I hover over the emoji to see what the text is. I just think of this like a font. Like, yeah, it matters when Google changes my fonts, but it's not, it is redesigning a language in a fairly subtle way. I guess this is a little more obvious.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  It matters because traditionally.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  When you send a sign.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  Are you an emoji traditionalist?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  No, what I'm saying, no, I'm saying language. I'm talking semiotics here. When you write a letter, the other person sees the letter.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  No, it's like when you write something in cursive and somebody would change the font drastically or they would OCR it and translate it into text. It's different, but it's like Nietzsche typewriter different.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Right, but like this thing is like built into the technology of transmitting the sign from me to you changes what the sign looks like and possibly means.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  But that's always happened.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is a different, this is a different inflection because it literally depends on what device you're using. Like it, when I sent you a letter, you would see the literal physical thing I wrote on the letter. When I sent you, when I typed something, you'd see the literal physical thing that I typed. But there's like, the translation is different because you're using an iPhone and I'm using a Samsung phone. Like, I don't know that what I'm sending you is literally going to be displayed in the same way that like, because the, because emoji are, they're essentially glyphs, right? They visually represent the emotion that they're meant to convey. A letter is supposed, is abstract. It's abstracted away from the emotion. And so if the letter looks different, it's okay. What you're getting is the abstraction. If an emoji looks different, it not, it conveys the, the thing it's meant to convey

• 11:01Speaker 01

  by the way that it looks by like a, it being literally a smiley face. And if that literal smiley face looks different, I can't trust that you are receiving the thing I'm intending to send because the layer of abstraction that actually protects us and makes communication possible is going away.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Wait, I have that. I don't think of emoji as being like, I don't care what it looks like. I think of it as a letter or like a glyph or a symbol.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  I totally just, it does not matter to me what it looks like as long as I know this is the sad emoji or the happy one.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's because people, I think people generally like you and they don't send you a bunch of grimaces when you talk to them. I, on the other hand, receive nothing but grimaces. And I don't know if maybe they, they're trying to smile or they're actually just really grinding their teeth at me. Well, usually it's the teeth grinding.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, in terms of being a wacky morning show, we have immediately failed. I could not, I'm looking at a whole list of sound effects here and I just don't know which one to play.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Semiotics.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  I'll say this, I don't like, I think you guys are thinking of emoji as a very like utilities type of thing. And for me, I just use emoji because like, sometimes I'm trying to convey a feeling. That's literally how I see myself. So like, maybe I like the blobs because I identify as a blob.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  I think the point here, there's all this news that we should talk about, but emoji is complicated. It's, it's so much more complicated than anyone actually gives it credit for, because it's how we communicate. And the nexus between what Dieter is saying and what Addie is saying is, when you said, if I was to send text to somebody through a system and it changed the font, I would like, be like, that sucks, but it's okay, because you're still reading my words. But if it just actually changed the meaning, and it depends on how much meaning you assigned to the emoji. And that is like a complicated philosophical question that Google's like, yeah, we're gonna make you contend with it now. And no, but they're

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  actually, they're making it better, because they are the, they change, they're changing their emojis to look just a little bit more like, like the standard emojis that Apple or Twitter are making. And so what they're doing is they're like, they're moving, they've moved their emojis more towards not being identical to like, a universal set of emoji, but like, closer to what other, other platforms make their emoji look like. So, like, Nat's right. They're like, they're pulling away some like, cute, unique character from Android. And so that's like, that's, it's maybe gonna make that communication better and add less friction to it, but it's gonna change it. Well, I can confidently say that emoji unification is, will be an ongoing theme. The flattening of emoji discrepancy.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I think language wars were probably a thing at the early development of language. This is like the divergence of dialects, and we're gonna see which one wins and which one dies.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  I wonder if there were Zoo Crew shows during the early development of language. Anyway, Dieter, I want you to talk about Assistant, because it's what it's coming to the iPhone. It is gaining all these new capabilities are all kind of small. Tell me more.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I was gonna try and list off like all like 20 features that they're adding, but Safari is a garbage fire and it's frozen. So here's the here's the news. They announced the Google Assistant last year. And it was, everybody was like, okay, whatever. And it's Google's version of Siri. Why don't you give it a name? And this year they're like, no, we're we've got Google Home now. We've got them on watches now. It works on cars now. Now we're adding it to the iPhone. And we're like solidifying our story that Assistant is a separate thing from search. And there are just here's a here's a million features that we're adding, like a bunch of different languages. It works with a Chromecast.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  You can do Google Actions, which is the Google equivalent of Alexa Skills on phones now. Like just down the line, they just like layered on a million features. And to me, the the the story of what they're doing with Assistant is they are actually building a foundation for this thing to actually matter as an assistant and not just be a thing that you use to set alarms with. And the thing that Google is doing this year that they didn't do in previous years when they tried to like talk about AI on the phone like Google Now or now on Tap is they're not saying this thing is great. You should go use it because it's going to change the future. It's the this is the way everything's going to work. They're saying, yeah, it's the assistant. It's got a ways to go, but it's probably better than everybody else's.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  And that's that's kind of the zone where they they they talked about it. The the big the the context to think of it in is the the assistant story runs parallel to this other like AI and machine learning story that they're telling, which isn't necessarily directly connected to a consumer product, but is actually like Google's biggest moat, biggest strength as a company outside of like owning the entire ad market on the internet, which by the way, isn't a bad strength. But that's like what they're doing with that the stuff when you fell asleep and they started talking about TensorFlow and like learning algorithms is like actually the thing that makes them more powerful than other companies.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  I, the standout thing for me was this screen thing. Because in a way, it was like, we made Echo Show 2. And you already have the screen and you don't have to buy another thing. You don't have to have another. And there's something I really like about that. Like Chromecast on a Google Assistant, like Google Home and stuff is already pretty slick. But this idea of utilizing a screen that is already in your home is, is kinda, it's kinda cool to me. It seems like next level. It seems like futuristic that like automatically, like the screens around you should reconfigure to what you want to be doing right now. And if right now, you want to be talking to Google Assistant, why shouldn't contextual information be showing up on your TV? I really like.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  It's good that you called it futuristic because none of this shit is launching until sometime in the future.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just want to explain what Paul is talking about. So one of the new features of Google Assistant is that it can display, I wouldn't call it an interface, but display information to a Chromecast that's plugged into a TV or a cast-enabled TV.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Or your phone. Like it'll, it'll also shoot stuff to your phone if you don't have a cast TV. Anyway, keep going.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. But you can say, "Show me my calendar," and your TV will light up and show you your calendar. You can say, "Show me what's on YouTube," and your TV will light up and actually show you the information, or show you the videos you can watch on YouTube, and then you can pick one. There's a lot there. Particularly, you have to trust that HDMI CEC will like light up your TV, or you have to leave your TV on all the time. But I tweeted that, and you know, Matt McCray, the CTO of Vizio, which makes cast-enabled TVs, was like, "Or you just buy a cast-enabled TV," which of course you would say because he sells them. But that is, to me, that's like, the, as Paul is saying, that creates the sense that you're surrounded by ambiently smart screens everywhere that you are.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  And what you're doing is, is linking them all to one thing. And I, to one service or one intelligence that's helping you, right? An assistant, if you will. I think Chromecast is really smart because it forces Google to think of how its cloud services can display on TV, instead of thinking of the TV as a computer unto itself, which. I think, and I thought for a long time, is the big split in sort of like TV device methodology. And the computer way is kind of like diverging along one path in the, this is just another screen for the cloud. With what Google's doing here is kind of taking the next step along its path.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  I think this is actually in the original, the guy who defined the term ubiquitous computing, the thing that he was describing was very much like, you wake up and you talk and you're like, ambient world like computer shows things on screens and knows exactly what you want.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But at the same time, Dieter, you did a whole hands-on with like the new version of Android TV.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Like they're doing that, it's Google. It's like, yeah, we're doing that too.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  We actually, I actually forgot to bring up like one of the other really exciting things is Google has taken a bunch of its image recognition stuff and actually like put it together in something they're calling Google Lens. And they're going to just throw that at a bunch of products. So they're throwing it at Google Photos, which got a huge update. Or is getting a huge update and they're throwing it at the Assistant. So now when you open up the Assistant on an iPhone or an Android phone, you can have a keyboard input, you can have a voice input, or you can have a camera input. And like it basically will just take information from you, whatever way you want to give it to it.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I remember actually, Paul, the day Siri came out, I remember you asking, why can't I just type to this thing?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  I think you might have written a piece about it.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Probably. So I downloaded Assistant and I put it on my, you know, in the widgets on iOS. I made it the top widget. So I could just tap, like tap it and then like go into the interface. And then like the first five questions that I typed to Google Assistant, Google Assistant's like, I don't know what's going on.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I would say it got off to a very rocky start. Presumably it will get better because it's designed to learn. But that first day, just the number of tweets of I saw of people being like, this thing has no idea what it's doing right now. Is it the same Assistant? Is it tied into the same backend? Or is it like learning from the beginning on the iPhone, what iPhone people want to ask?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it should already know the stuff that your Google account knows about you. Like what kind of stuff was it not able to answer?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Let me pull it up.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it was, it's like everything. It's like the ba- the basic, like, literally things like, tell me a joke, like the things that you would expect. It's like, I'm, I don't know. I, I just got here, like.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Wait, really?

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Can you try, can you ask Google Assistant right now, Paul, to tell us a joke?

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming it's better now. I'm saying that very first minute it was available, it was just failing for me all over the place.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  One joke coming up. Why can't a ty- tyrannosaurus clap?

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Short arms?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  It's extinct. I didn't know.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  That is so dark.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  So, so I, I asked Google Assistant, what can you do? And it like gave that list of cards and stuff. I said, do you ever want to just chat? And Assistant said, my apologies, I don't understand. And I said, what's up? And Google Assistant said, just searching for answers to life, whatever. And I said, can you play video on my TV? Right? I have a cast-enabled TV and I want to learn more about this. And then I found this on Google and something, a Google support of a page for Google Play. Um, then I said, do you work with Chromecast? And I got like a, some about page for Chromecast. I said, open YouTube on my TV.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  And said, sorry, I don't know how to open that, but I'm still learning. And, and then I said, I don't know why I said this. I said, define inquiry.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's also a command that Dieter accepts. Fundamentally.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  True. Actually, I can, I accept all those.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's just like, it's new, whatever, like it'll get better, but it, that, that first day, and I think this is emblematic, like we've been saying of everything Google did at I O. It's not, most of it's not even going to come out for a few weeks or months. And the rest of it, the, the promise is, it will get better, but like, here's the next little step.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  And that's a really hard problem for Google. Like, Apple comes out, it's like, all right, we did a thing. We're going to explain why it matters and you're going to be able to buy it tomorrow or, you know, in two weeks. Uh, so like, sometimes it's a big deal. Like, you know, I don't know, not, not that the Apple Watch is a big deal, but like, they came out, they said, here's the thing, here's why it exists, here's what we're doing with it, here's all the stuff you need to know about it. Go buy it. Google's like, all right, we did a thing. Here's 5% of the story. Over the next year or two, it's going to be amazing. Uh, hang on, it's coming soon. Uh, okay.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  I do think Google could have a problem going forward if they can't keep all of their platforms that support Assistant at parity, because they feel like one of the best ways that you learn about features that something like a new interface like this does is that your friends tell you. So if your friend is having some great experience with Assistant and they tell you about it, and then you try it with whatever device you have that accesses Assistant and that feature's not available to you, I feel like that could be a problem.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, especially because now they're adding it to like washing machines and refrigerators.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Literally washing machines.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, what should you expect a conversation with your washing machine to be like?

• 23:53Speaker 05

  I mean, how long is this going to be over?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  No, my washing machine relationship is extremely complicated, actually. I mean, when I had one.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I only have one friend, it's my oven. Again, I just like to point out, I've been trying so hard to capture that Zoo Crew vibe, and now we're like tyrannosaurs are extinct, we're only friends with major appliances. We have no idea what those relationships should be like. So Paul, tell us, what's the traffic like today, buddy?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Like outside? Oh, there's a lot of big trains are down. I feel like the red trains are down and the green trains are down. So a lot of people are having some commute probs.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  And apparently in San Francisco, it's very cold to the point that Dieter can't type. So there's the weather for the week.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I want to do. Dieter, just real wrap up. You wrote a long piece about AIs and UIO.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  I did.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  You also, I know you spent some time after the event, sort of talking to executives. Just give me kind of the top level of what's happening with AI in Google. And then I want to read an ad and we should come back and talk about Android and VR.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  So, I mean, there's like the thing I wrote in the piece, which is all computer revolutions happen because the distance or the difference between the thing you use to input information and the thing the computer uses to spit information back out at you gets smaller. And I think that for Google, it believes that like, it's like the thing that fundamentally the things that computers are going to do in the future is be artificial intelligence machines. And if the computer's thinking brain is also the thing that you directly interact with by talking to it or typing at it or whatever, that it's going to change the way that like

• 25:37Speaker 01

  computers work. And so when you hear Sundar Pichai get on stage and say, we're moving from a mobile first to an AI first world. That thing, which is like just a giant cliche that just sounds like totally empty is actually pointing at that idea. Like, I don't know, they, this thing called TensorFlow. It's their, it's their like name for all the stuff that they do in open source when it comes to like machine learning. And they have a chip which they call a TPU. So there's a CPU, which you know what that is. There's a GPU, you know what that is. The TPU is like a GPU, but it's for AI instead of for graphics.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  They're, they've made these things. They're like, they're leasing them out on their clouds. So you can like buy time using them and they're more effective. They're also now good, not just at like spitting out the things that machine learning knows. It's also good for training it. And they do this insane thing. Man, it's really grand, but stick with me for a second. So when you're training a machine learning computer, you give it a giant data set. You give it a million pictures of cats. And then it takes those million pictures of cats and it runs an algorithm and then it like takes a subset. It's like, okay, these are probably cats. These are probably cats. These are probably cats. These are probably cats. And at the top it's like, yep, this is a cat. And what Google does is instead of like throwing one algorithm at the problem,

• 27:03Speaker 01

  they throw 50 algorithms at the problem. And then it takes every single one of those 50 algorithms and it puts it inside another algorithm. And then it, it uses that algorithm to figure out which one is the best one. Does that make sense?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  It uses neural networks and machine learning to pick better machine learning algorithms.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Right, so instead of a data set of cats that it's applying an algorithm to, it's a data set of algorithms.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Which is important, and something they said on stage is that the machine learning is obviously revolutionizing like a ton of stuff for us right now, but is very much limited to basically PhDs and like a few other experts. Like it's a very specialized knowledge.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so Google actually edited the keynote by trying to counteract that by like putting a high school student on a video who like picked up and learned TensorFlow and like used it to improve breast cancer, or not treatment, breast cancer diagnosis. So like, they really believe that the next app developers are gonna be like Google machine learning developers.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's true, because I think you're right, that like it is primarily still in the academic realm right now.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they can make it accessible, and I think that's why it actually is a very important statement that this, this TPUV2, which by the way was my gadget of the week. It's all gone now. But the TPUV2, so like, the current gen TPU was used for AlphaGo, right? So it has the algorithm that's already been built, kind of embedded in it, and it can run that algorithm really fast. The fact that the new TPU can be used for training new algorithms is really exciting because there's a lot of these problems that are really exciting, but can only kind of

• 28:53Speaker 02

  be worked on by companies of like Google and Facebook scale. Because they'll have to, like, they have to take a million pictures of cats, and they have to run it for, for, you know, days or weeks, and, you know, they have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of computing time to get the answers. So it's not... Technology that's really available to everybody. And so if you can get a lot cheaper to train these things, then there's a lot more developers that can bring their own problems to this technology and hopefully solve. So I'm hoping that we see a lot, a much wider diversity of problems that are solved with this technology. And I think, I think Google is doing everything right with TensorFlow.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Like developers had a huge range of choices of, of machine learning frameworks and Google has just worked so hard on TensorFlow and then also by hardware accelerating it. You know, developers still have a lot of choices, but they're just all choosing TensorFlow. So good job. Well, it's, it's nice to see something being chosen on technical merits and it's not, you know, it's not all lock in right now.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Eli, were you silent because you were trying to find another Zoo Crew sound effect right there?

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  100%.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  There's not a great Zoo Crew sound effect. I'm just going to play Hail the Chief.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  That's all I got right now.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Anyways, that was my weekly gadget segment that I do every week called Tensoring with the Flow.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Unfortunately, the theme song to your segment is now Hail to the Chief.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I gotta read this ad. Uh, and we're coming back. We gotta talk about Android. We gotta talk about VR and we gotta, there's a bunch of other little Google stuff to talk about, but those two are important.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

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• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Start your free trial at Squarespace.com today and enter offer code VERGE to get 10% off your first purchase. Again, go to Squarespace.com and enter offer code VERGE, that's V E R G E, to get 10% off your first purchase. All right, we're back. Dieter.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  Nat. Nat, you've been using Android O, right? You were at our preview.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  Tell me, tell me what's going on. And Dieter, tell me what you've been seeing there.

• 31:53Speaker 05

  Well, the problem is that there's not a lot of things that you can do right now. I mean, when I first tried to develop a preview, there was a lot of stuff that we saw in the backend and we were like, this looks like stuff that's coming, but I can't use any of it right now. Like, there's picture-in-picture. Awesome. I can't use it because it's not readily available. And this week, it's like, Google finally says, hey, you can watch YouTube and then like minimize the screen and do other stuff while you're watching YouTube. But that literally just happened. So it's like, a lot of people aren't going to be able to use this yet. Only this week did it become actually sort of safe to download Android O and not wreck your phone. And even still, I think like fairly limited amount of devices can use the beta, right, Dieter?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I'm sure it's like mostly just pixels right now.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like a bunch of old Nexus's in pixels.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Nexus, yeah. I think that the most important Android O announcement didn't happen at Google I/O. They, they, they did, they announced it before Google I/O. It didn't even get stage time. I think they were reticent to talk about it on stage because they didn't want to raise expectations too much. But the most important update in Android O, in my opinion, isn't like the battery improvements. I think they're interesting because like they're finally doing what Apple does and telling background applications to piss off and shut down. But the most important thing is Project Treble, which is, they are re-architecting Android such that they're modular, modularizing it so that they can send out updates faster. And they are putting like manufacturer customizations,

• 33:23Speaker 01

  like basically in a box so that chipmakers and Google can push out updates faster and push out updates with like less, having to have fewer conversations with both carriers and, and like the people that make like Android skins. It's a very, very open question about whether or not a company like Samsung is going to stay inside the nice little box that Google has constructed for them inside the OS. But if they're actually successful at it... It could mean maybe that Android might actually get updated on phones on a more regular basis.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  If you step back and look at Android updates, Google has built an amazing, very, very good system for updating Android. There's another partition, so like the entire operating system downloads in the background like on the other partition. And then when it's time to update, you just switch to the new partition and your old one's there in case it goes wrong. There is this new treble system where like all the custom crap gets put in a box and like they can update around it. So you don't have to wait for Samsung to approve it or wait for Verizon to approve it. Like they've built an amazing system, except for the most important part, which is like actually having leverage, like actual like money and like political leverage over carriers and manufacturers to get them pushed out quickly.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  This is going to be unpopular opinion. And by the way, I'd like to remind everybody or inform everyone. The Archer theme was just Dieter's ringtone, not me doing Zooker stuff.

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  But to me, and this is going to be unpopular, but bear with me. I think the Android fragmentation situation is worse, not better. It's harder for me to know what a given Android device is going to do when or how it's going to behave when. And the here's Android. Oh, it's really exciting and do all this stuff. But I have several devices that are still running like lollipop, you know, like it's and all the things that Samsung is doing, which is easily the most important Samsung distribution out there are way off in another direction.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. There was a time when I was very confident in my knowledge of what every version of Android could do that was around me. And now I feel like I'm spending more and more time thinking about what version of Android I'm holding in my hand. Does that make any sense?

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, thank you. That segment of the rich gas has come to an end.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Honestly, like that's true, but like the only fragmentation that matters is Samsung.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  I'm sorry HTC, I'm sorry LG, love you guys. But if those phones are a little bit fragmented, like the, you know, 200,000 people on the planet that buy them, like, they'll figure it out, uh, cause they love those companies and they really are bought into that vision. But the, the one that matters is Samsung, cause that's the one that like sells the most. And whatever Google can do to like, make sure that Samsung stays a little bit in line, uh, the better.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  It matters in the US, right? Because worldwide, there are, like, in China, there are very dominant companies that are-

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, China's a whole other story because Google Play isn't in China. And so like a bunch of the other stuff that Google is doing, like, uh, Google Protect, where they like actually show you how Google Play keeps your phone, uh, safe from malware. Uh, like, the, the core of how Google renders HTML, um, has, is basically switched to Chrome. Uh, and that is also getting updated directly through the, the Google Play Store. So there's like, there was this Android fireside chat at like 6:30 PM yesterday, which is why we're recording late, by the way. And like, the question that got the second most applause was, hey, uh, Android's open source, you're all Android people, that's great. But it seems like more and more crap is getting pushed through the Google Play Store, which is all Google stuff.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And so why is, why is Android feel like half of what matters is like Google stuff, not Android stuff? And like, are you, is that stuff ever gonna get open sourced? And I kid you not, the Android team was like, yeah, you know what? Uh, you should ask, uh, Google that.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Well, Google Play, but yeah, the most applause, by the way, by far, was for Kotlin.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  Paul?

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is literally your moment to shine.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  I know, I know. I, I, I was like, the evening before, I was literally on a webpage that was like, differences between Kotlin and Java.

• 38:03Nilay Patel?

  Again, classic Zoo Crew bit.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  But, uh-

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Okay. Kotlin is a programming language created by a Russian IDE company called Jetbrains. And Jetbrains is very popular. They make IntelliJ, which is like a very successful Java IDE. And Google uses IntelliJ for its Android Studio that it gives to developers to make Android apps. So like five or six years ago, this company, Jetbrains, decided to make another programming language because we didn't have enough and called it Kotlin. And it's very much like Java.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  And but it really, one of the biggest problems with Android development is, for one, they've been stuck on like an old version of Java for a while. So they haven't gotten a lot of new features. And they are about to get a bunch of new features from Java 8. But also, Java just sucks. Especially for... It's actually, you know, it's really well suited for a very large corporation that wants to have, you know, meetings and procedure about every single thing. But for the, you know, the one or two person app development team, it's really intimidating

• 39:33Speaker 02

  and it's a ton of boilerplate and it's just, it's very verbose and it has a lot of strictures on how you can do things. And so the idea about behind Kotlin is just like basically a better Java. And one of the nice things about it is it has this crazy interoperability with Java so that you can, they actually showed this demo that was pretty crazy where they like literally copy and pasted some Java code and then pushed a button in their fancy IDE and it turned into Kotlin code. So the transition for development, because the obvious parallel is Apple introduced the Swift programming language, which is something that they developed.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  The transition between Objective C and Swift has been fairly long and it's still not complete and in some cases, a little painful because they're just very different languages. But Kotlin is so similar to Java, it's easy to conceive of a lot of developers wanting to move over and having a very, it looks like, a very easy time moving over.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  Give me an example, just to make it more understandable, of a concrete benefit you get out of Kotlin.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Well, one of the, okay, so, are you familiar with Objective, object-oriented program?

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  Sure, sure. Let's assume for the sake of this super show.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  So, you're gonna make a class, right? But all you want to do with the class that you're creating is store some data, right? So what do you need for any data class in Java? You gotta have getters and setters. Getters and setters. Getters and setters, right? Am I right?

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  So, so they showed this demo where, where there, there was this like, probably like, 400-word, that's the wrong, let's say like 30 or 40 lines of Java code to create a data class that is basically like, I'm gonna store some information and you'll be able to modify it and, and I'll give you the information back. That's all it's really doing. And so they showed that, here's the Java code, and then here's the one line of Kotlin code that does all of that. You just declare a data class in Kotlin and it will do all the best practices of, of like, wiring it up to be, to have like these getters and setters. Getters and setters.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  So, it'll make it faster for developers to write apps and presumably simpler.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I mean by boilerplate.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  As a user, what's the benefit that you would see over time?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Well, the, the big one is that, for one, a lot of developers avoid using Java and so they've been using other frameworks. There's a bunch of, I actually wanted to touch on this, but I'll, I'll get to it. So, some developers don't like Java and might avoid Java and, and, and therefore won't work on Android. And so you're, you'll possibly attract more people willing to port their iOS apps over or to try Android who, who didn't want to mess with Java because Java is so loathed. And then the other, the other thing is that theoretically you'll have like faster iterations, or if Kotlin is as good as a lot of people are saying it is, it will make

• 42:57Speaker 02

  it easier to develop apps. And if it's easier for developers to develop apps, then you'll get better apps and your apps will be updated more frequently and they will improve over time. But the, the thing I, I've been thinking about a lot is that there's iOS and there's Android. And right now, some of the best tools to make iOS and Android apps are not made by Apple or Google. There's Face, Facebook has done a lot of work and Microsoft just announced a lot of stuff. There's a lot of, there's a lot of work in companies outside of Apple, because like, the only companies that want you to only develop apps for iOS

• 43:37Speaker 02

  or Android are Apple and Google. Everybody, every other company wants to have their apps everywhere. So, Google has done a little bit to have like a cross-platform framework. Apple has done absolutely nothing to have a cross-platform framework. Microsoft has some cross-platform stuff. Facebook has some cross-platform stuff. So, I think that it's an interesting time because mobile platforms are so well-defined. And, and we know most of what they do and most of what the user interfaces are like and most of the features that you need to support. And so there's a kind of this huge push in the

• 44:20Speaker 02

  developer community, create better tools for developers. And whoever does the best job of that could kind of like win in the next generation. I don't know if Kotlin really helps with that, other than shoring up current Android developers and possibly attracting new ones. But Kotlin also has some stuff that would be possibly cross-platform. There's so much, I don't know, I'm getting into this.

• 44:43Nilay Patel?

  But this is why there's like wild applause for it, right? I mean, it feels like a dramatic upgrade to the life of an Android developer. Because we've heard for a long time that making Android apps is somewhat more irritating than making an iPhone app.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, it shows that Google cares at all about that.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're not just punting you off to somebody else's framework. They're really developing tools and working with jetbrains. I mean, that's the thing. This Cottlin is another example of people outside of Apple or Google wanting to create tools that work across platforms and that are really easy to use and that are very focused on developer productivity in ways that Apple and Google never seem to quite grasp. And so it seems like they did a really good job of that. And so it's really cool for Google to embrace that instead of ignoring it.

• 45:36Nilay Patel?

  Nice. Okay.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  You gotta talk about AR and VR. Yeah, yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  We have to.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  So, Google did a thing that people have been thinking it would for a long time and introduced an all-in-one headset with inside-out tracking, which sounds really wonky, but the upshot is that you don't have to put together all of these parts. You just have one headset and you don't have to put a phone in it. You can turn it on, it runs, and you don't have to set up cameras or trackers or anything because it uses edge detection to map the room and basically create its own markers. So it knows like, this is a table, this table's like three feet away. I can use this. And you can actually walk around in VR without having something creating boundaries for you.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Is that what Tango did a little bit?

• 46:17Speaker 03

  It is exactly what Tango did. That's what's cool.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  It's based on that technology?

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  So they basically took Tango, which they've had for a few years, but it's on like two phones. And they took Daydream, which is the VR platform they introduced last year that's Android-based, and they put those things together.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  But isn't Daydream kind of nowhere? Like, what is the status of Daydream? Because I have a Pixel and I want to use it, but I don't think it's anywhere else.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  So they did the one thing that they really, really needed to do, which is bring it to Samsung. So one of the big problems is that you need an OLED screen. A lot of things don't have OLED screens, but Samsung does, and it's been doing VR itself at a really high level. So they announced that this summer, you're going to get support for Daydream on the Galaxy S8, which basically means now if you own an S8, you have two Totally different VR platforms that you can pick from. There's the Samsung Cure VR, which is Oculus, and you have Androids, you have Daydream.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  So here was the, so the standalone headsets, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're basically just like Tango phones, but instead of like having a cell radio in them, they just like take the phone parts and build it into a headset. Yeah?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's that, but you also get to do things like redistribute it because mobile headsets are just, they are really uncomfortable.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Because you have all of your, you have a to, like, complete computer attached to the front of your face where it's pulling it down.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Whereas now they get to balance it so it can be comfortable.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Parts back by your ears or whatever and just have the screen in front of your eyes.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  You can like build it into the ring on the head or something like that.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  The other, so it was Lenovo and HTC that are making, that they promised to make standalone headsets.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  And Qualcomm is making a reference design.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Qualcomm's making a reference design. Explain this to me. When they announced that HTC was making, what are they, are they calling these VR headsets? Mixed reality headsets? Immersive reality headsets?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  They're not jerks, like Microsoft.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  The whole banner that they have is immersive computing, but they are not going to make you use that. They're just like, this is our catchall.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Is WorldSense a brand name or just a?

• 48:25Speaker 03

  That is, I guess maybe it's a brand, but it's just the name for the tracking technology they have. It's like TensorFlow or whatever.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Better than Tango, basically.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  And Tango is also a brand. That would be literally confusing.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Right. But when HTC, when they announced HTC was making a headset, what they actually said was, "An HTC Vive is making a headset."

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Right? It's like, it's like they, either they like referred to Vive as like separate company from HTC, or they implied that this headset would also be called Vive, or they just wanted you to remember that, hey, you like the Vive, so maybe you like this thing too. Like, it was really unclear to me, like, what that was.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  It's a little bit complicated because the, it's also just that Vive is now HTC's sort of sub-brand.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  I think they literally did spin it off into a separate entity.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  That's nesting. But this is mostly happening in China, that they have a Viveport store. They have a Viveport mobile store.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  There was this thing where they made a concept phone that said Vive on the back a long time ago. They've been implying they're going to make a mobile headset. They have all of these things like with trackers. So it's kind of... It's like that that is their sub-label of VR quote.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I I think it's A, it's a little bit of, hey, you know, I like this brand. B, Google announcing things that it's doing with HTC, historically, doesn't go great. So they're pointing at like the better one.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  You mean Android?

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, I mean, the Pixel, which HTC builds and is unable to ship.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, HTC's entire entire life cycle is an Android hardware maker. Does not, it's not a story of ongoing success.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  By the way, I asked about I asked about Pixel shipping really quick, just very quickly. Uh, Dave Burke, who's in charge of Android, I'm like, I made some joke about not being able to ship the Pixel. And he said, yeah, you know, one of the hard lessons in making phones is by the time you realize you don't have a good enough supply chain, it's too late to build one.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow. But they, but doesn't HTC have, never mind, I can't do this. We, we do this on every episode. So Addy, uh, I feel like you are the smartest person I know.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Full stop.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  Paying attention to VR. You're actually full stop, one of the smartest people I know. But when it comes to knowing what's happening in VR, I feel like I I just gonna ask you, where's Google right now in the in the VR story? Are they leading? Are they behind? Are they, you know, laying out their pieces on the board? What what's their status?

• 50:52Speaker 03

  It feels definitely like a laying out the pieces because Daydream, it's sort of, they're competing with the Gear VR, but the Gear VR in itself is sort of rudimentary VR. And they're definitely not as good because Oculus just bends over backwards to get games on that. And so they have Daydream, but then they're updating Daydream to work with things that aren't phones. So they've been kind of building that out. And then they're putting it on this headset, which is has some ridiculous timeline. Like it's going to ship by the end of the year and they literally did not show a single image of it. They showed like a line drawing. So that's going to happen fast, I guess. And if it does happen, it ships with the Daydream

• 51:32Speaker 03

  controller, though, which is not a tracked motion controller. It's like a huge compromise. So you get this great headset theoretically, but it can't compete with the Vive or the Rift because you don't have hands. And then they're gonna update that, obviously.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Do you think the WorldSense sensors are going to be able to like track your hands and let you control stuff that way? Or is that like too complicated for them?

• 51:51Speaker 03

  Given that Microsoft announced a thing that did absolutely exactly that, like a week ago, I'm gonna guess Google is at least working on it.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  The other option, which is getting actually wonky, is that you put a magnetic sensor on the top of the headset, and you put magnetic sensors in the controllers and you have a like relative distance thing, because if the headset knows where it is, then it like bootstraps or daisy chains onto the controllers and it can tell you where those are.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Magnets.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Isn't that how like Razer had a tracking technology like that, right?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Razer did not. Sixth Sense did, and they were turning it into the most disastrous VR Kickstarter of all time. Because they had this great technology, but they could not turn it into a project because they didn't have a supply chain.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  In my opinion, the greatest VR title that's ever been made is Job Simulator, and Google owns Alchemy Labs now, which made Job Simulator. So Google's winning at VR.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  They also own Tilt Brush, which is probably the second best. Like, those are the two things that people who don't like gaming have heard of and like in VR.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  And they both require controllers.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  Yes, which are now just gonna be on the Vive. I'm just, I really want to actually see these things. I saw a prototype. They didn't show it on stage. We couldn't take pictures of it. It worked, but it is obviously not a project, like a product that you're shipping.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Does Daydream have enough features now? It seems like it should be another Windows app for me now. Like, I've got Steam where I can launch VR games. I've got the Oculus thing where I can launch VR games. I should just be able to double-click Daydream and use Google type. Stuff on Windows with with whatever VR headset I have, right?

• 53:36Speaker 03

  I'm that's getting really complicated. That's if you think of Daydream as an entire OS with its own sort of store and that kind of thing. It's not really like Steam. It's like you want to run like Apple on Windows.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  It's I mean, it's not exactly like that, but it is that they're still figuring that out.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  And it's like with the VR browser type stuff, right?

• 53:57Speaker 03

  The VR browser, that's like, that's Chrome. It you could absolutely roll out features like that. If you're talking about Daydream or Google VR, you're also literally talking about like component optimization and stuff.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Which means that you could probably port a lot of the features, but it's like semantically is that Daydream.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  So disclosure, my wife works for Oculus. Facebook also says that they're making a standalone headset at some point. Google claimed that they have done something that like there's a distinction between desktop VR and mobile VR and like desktop VR is way better and mobile VR is like way worse and it doesn't look as good and these Daydream headsets seem like they're pretty firmly in the mobile VR camp.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  No, they will dispute that.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Google would dispute it because they have created this thing called Sera? Sera?

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Sera.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Sera.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Named after the pointless painter.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Pointless pointless painting graphics engine for VR? Is that what like, what is it?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  It's

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I don't understand it at all.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  I I made Paul like explain it on the site, but the way that I understand it based on pictures is that you have something and it's like you're standing in a corner, you're looking at like a real world building. You take a bunch of pictures of it from every possible angle and instead of constructing the entire building, you just show people that picture from whatever angle they're at. So you don't have to render everything. You have to render like a facade. I think somebody compared it to it's like you make a cardboard cutout of a town. It's like Potemkin VR.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Right. I was gonna say Wild West.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was thinking Wild West.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  But yeah, so it's supposed to vastly simplify it because it's kind of like it's cheating, but you can't tell.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've I it's almost like a panorama 2.0 kind of. I feel like it's like I I don't I feel like most experiences that people want to make, and maybe I'm wrong, will not work with this. Like if the setting is all at all like animated or whatever or dynamic, it doesn't seem like it would work. But for like virtual tours, it's kind of nice.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  I mean, they told me they made not me, they like made a point of saying, hey, and it works with dynamic stuff. But the question is how to what extent that happens. Like if you have a thing that's actually like a game like Job Simulator and you're constantly throwing things around. Do those things make up so much of the bulk of what you need that it doesn't really matter that you've optimized the environments?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Are these headsets going to be wildly more powerful than my phone? So that if I like something says it works with Daydream, I have to then check to see if it only works with like cool Daydream headsets instead of Daydream phones?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Uh, well, it'd be awesome if Google had actually given us any specs or anything like that. So I don't know, but.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Didn't they say the reference headset was a Snap Snapdragon?

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Eight thirty-five, yeah, but we, I don't know anything beyond that. But the idea like is that all Daydream phone apps are supposed to work on Daydream not phone. And Daydream.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  That's what they're gonna call it, by the way, the Daydream not phone.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  I'm calling Microsoft headsets not hole and snap some to do the same thing. But that you're supposed to be able to run like things that maybe need positional tracking on your Daydream not like your not phone. But everything else should run on the phone too. Like they're they're positioning this as a sort of standard that works on both.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Which raises questions about how much they can optimize things or like how far the optimization can go. But they're right now, they're just saying this thing we have is magic and it'll make everything beautiful.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Well, in theory, the headsets could push way more because they don't have all of like Android's, you know, phone crap sitting in the background. I mean, it's still probably Android at the core of it, but they could strip away a bunch of the stuff that you need to like run Twitter and make Facebook happen and like make phone calls.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Right. They also don't have cameras in this early. They have cameras, but they're like depth sensing, so they don't need anything that involves taking a picture.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  But so you can't like, you can't like see the world like through the headset like you can in Microsoft's mixed reality stuff?

• 57:42Speaker 03

  No, it is not doing the, it's not doing the mixed reality part of the virtual reality.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  They might later, but.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  First of all, I'd like to point out that Dieter got added to say mixed reality without hissing.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  No, the thing is that I'm fine with mixed reality. I am absolutely fine with it as a description of a technology. I'm not fine when you say absolutely everything is mixed reality and you don't give me any other words to describe it. Like I'm fine with saying house, but you also have to be able to say like bungalow and all, tower and shack. And you don't get to tell me to not use those words.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  Addie Robertson, you must be able to say bungalow. It's a great, it's a great memoir, I have to say. Addie, give me one line, like, one brief sum up. This sounds like a lot of stuff. What is, there was the big Microsoft thing, you're obviously Oculus is being sued, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff happening in VR. What is your, like, very quick take on the state and who is kind of winning and losing?

• 58:34Speaker 03

  So, the state, first of all, just to call, set up things. I think that the thing that Google not phone daydream is trying to do is get to Apple. Because the state of, like, mobile VR is that everybody does things. But if you don't have iOS onboard and you don't have, like, people who are iPhone users, you can't do anything. And that limits phone-based VR a lot. So, all these companies, every single company that does major VR is now making an inside-out tracked headset. And the vast majority of them are doing standalone headsets. So they're sort of trying to make VR a thing that anyone can buy without having to turn it into a lifestyle. That if you're an Oculus user, you're like, I have my room full of cameras.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  If you're a daydream user right now, you're like, yeah, I use the Pixel phone, which five people have in the world. So, basically, this is, the idea is that they're moving toward the second generation of VR, and the second generation of VR is where VR is just a thing that you can get in isolation instead of having to change your life around it. But, that most of these systems are not remotely near something that I would recommend commercially. They're all mostly kind of bad.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  And even the ones that are not bad, it's like, they're not really a commercial product. They don't really know how to polish those up. I feel like Facebook has maybe literally forgotten that it made one. It showed it off last year, and it's actually the best, some of the best tracking I've ever seen, but I have not heard of it since. And Oculus pulled out of CES, and they pulled out of E3, and I'm not really sure where that leaves them. And they got sued.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It does seem like another inflection point that often feels like a huge lull. Okay, I gotta read this ad. We got a little bit of a lightning round, and we gotta wrap up.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

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• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  Just go to ziprecruiter.com/verge. That is ziprecruiter.com/verge. You get it. Post jobs are free. So, try it out one more time. Ziprecruiter.com/verge.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  We got a little bit. There's some other little stuff that you wrote about Ford bringing Android Auto and Android CarPlay to its 2016 cars.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Very exciting.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  I want to talk about that. There was also some news at I/O about Volvo and Audi just using Android for the entire stack.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think that's smart. I think car companies should realize that they're not going... I don't think car companies really understand how people use touchscreen technology, and I understand that they have to prioritize safety first when it comes to information, providing information for the driver who should theoretically be focused on driving. But as we've seen with some of our screen drive reviews, it seems to be pretty clear that these car companies don't really understand how people interact and what they want to see out of cars and like, how to just make it pretty. So, I think that the fact that Volvo and Audi and other car companies likely are starting to use Android as the main platform is a good move.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  In my particular Ford review, Ford has its own system called Sync 3, and I personally drive a Ford and I've... Very, I'm very happy. Basically, the Android auto is coming to my car because Sync 3 is horrendous. Like, it will tell me that getting from my house to work will take 12 minutes. And when I reviewed the Ford Fusion, it took 40 minutes. I'm very upset about that. I think, Neelai, you already know that Sync 3 has a terrible time reading people's names, particularly ethnic names. Like, it butchered your name, Neelai, and it called you Nele Paddle.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  That's my code name.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  We're very upset by it because, you know, like, I have a lot of friends and family members who have ethnic names. And I, every time I get a text and Sync 3 tries to read them to me, I want to, like, just crash my car into the river to make it stop.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Wow, another dark moment.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  It's just so bad. It's so uncomfortable. And it takes five minutes because Sync 3 will literally read text message from, phone number, date, time, subject line, who it was sent to. And I was just like, please kill me.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  Sync 3 is the last platform in the world to know that SMS messages can have an optional subject line.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  It also adds the horrendous signature every time I reply, choose to reply by the system, which is equally awful as saying Nele Paddle. But anyway.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  But, so here's the thing. So I hung out with the CTO of Ford last week. I'm gonna put that interview up on the site next week. We took some photos of him, the whole thing. Two things happened after that interview. One, Ford announced it's laying off a bunch of people. So, go back and like, get an answer to him about what happened there. And two, I asked him very specifically why the cars aren't updatable, right? Because it's the question I've always, I have basically for every automaker. Like, you're gonna put a computer in your car. Modern computers, an obligation computer manufacturers have, is to update the software, at least along some reasonable timeframe. And he was like, yeah, I understand. We just can't do it. The screens don't support multi-touch. And then like, 20 minutes later, they announced they're doing it.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  So either I convince them, or like, or it's just like not, the left hand's not talking to the right hand. But he also told me, and I thought this was really interesting, they've hired like 400 engineers from BlackBerry.

• 1:04:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Nilay Patel?

  To work on Sync. And his whole thing is, if you look at the inside of a car, and his example was like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he's like, "We have added so many hardware controls to the car that are confusing, and we have not thought about the screen as the replacement for those hardware controls, the way that, you know, smartphones replaced buttons and keyboards with a big screen." And he's, you know, his example was, when you shift your car from like the snow icon on a four-wheel-drive car to the sand icon, we should actually tell you what those mean, because they don't mean sand and snow, they mean like deep particulate matter, and in deep snow, you actually want the sand icon, because it's more like sand than snow.

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  And the car should figure it out on its own, or the screen should be telling you what the hell is going on, and we're not going to give that away to Apple and Google. Like, that for us is, we have to reset the whole thing, the entire user interaction model of the car. And I thought it was really interesting, but it's, if, if the luxury car brands like Volvo and Audi are starting to push towards, "Let's give more of this to Google and use more of this as our common platform," they're going to be able to do more of the work on the, "What does the interface of our vehicle look like?" Whereas Ford is saying, "We have to build our entire own operating system over here with these BlackBerry engineers." I think that's like a fascinating split.

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it's ambitious, but like, let's face it, I think a lot of people, when they're going to buy a car, and they hear that, "Oh, the same OS that I'm already familiar with in my pocket is now in the car," I think that's probably going to be a lot more enticing to many people who are looking to buy or even lease cars. Let's, let's face it, like, no one wants to learn any OS.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, I feel like car manufacturers skinning Android is a bigger nightmare than phone manufacturers skinning Android. So we'll see. So that's one little piece of lightning round. Dieter, I'm curious, there's a new leak of the Surface Pro. It does not have USB.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  I, I, I just.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  But no USB C. Like, that's actually like the.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. Just like, it's fine. Like, they, they are committed to their strategy of saying USB C is bad. And they're not entirely wrong. I just wish that Microsoft would, in this particular case, do a better job of participating and moving the industry forward towards a better future, and they are not doing it.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  But they are going to give us mixed reality, which is the only type of reality that exists.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Okay, there are two cases in which I wish Microsoft.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I know you're, you're high on what AMD is doing with Ryzen. They're bringing it to laptops. Is that a thing? Should we care?

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  I feel like it matters less than, I think Ryzen is really exciting for desktops right now. I feel like it's going to matter less in the laptop because Intel's lead there is so huge that I feel like Ryzen is a huge upgrade over what AMD had in laptops before. And will make it viable and a reasonable thing to do. But I don't think it's like, it's huge competition. I think Intel's still going to dominate laptops.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean AMD's heat issues, it feels like matter less when it's what it's trying to do in the desktop, but that's always the question mark for me with AMD. And lastly, my little piece of the lightning round, FCC, it's the only thing I think about, obviously, our, our greatest government agency. The FCC voted to open the notice of proposed rulemaking so that they could reclassify the Internet Service Riders from Title 2 providers to Title 1 providers. So the next move, they haven't, haven't released it yet. There is some talk that they're trying to make it as lawsuit proof as possible. So they're reworking it based on some comments they've already gotten, the fact that. Minion Clyburn like dissented heavily.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  There's some talk that actually Republicans in Congress want there to be more of a nod towards actual rules. So they haven't released the text yet. We're going to dive into the text when it comes out, but they've voted to like begin the rulemaking process. So net neutrality is up for grabs for the foreseeable future until the vote to like actually implement whatever new rules they come up with. Interestingly, and I think I keep saying that I think Ajit Pai is like a little Trumpier than Trump. He is, and you know, his, his staff like, like troll tweets at me now. It's like a, an interesting part of my life. There were reporters at the vote yesterday and FCC security like basically assaulted some of them, uh, which is not the part of the Trump administrat-

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  like if Trump's whole platform is we're going to get rid of burdensome regulation and this agency is like going for it, that's great, right? People voted for that and it's happening and we can have a policy argument about it. And I think everybody listening to this knows that I love the policy argument. The part where reporters asking questions to FCC commissioners get assaulted by government security, that's the bad part of the Trump platform. And like, I just want people to know, listening to this, like I really care about the policy. I actually love the policy debate. I'm writing a thing for next week about the fact that fundamentally I don't really give a shit about Title II. Like what I care about is consumer products that you spend money on getting faster and

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  better and whether that mechanism is competition or regulation, like I don't care. Um, so I'm going to do that, but I just want to, I want to note this, like the way this is happening, it, the, I keep using the phrase Trumpier than Trump. Like that's how they're acting and I think it's, it's worth just calling out. So a lightning round that ends in a dour note, a Zoo Crew show that had literally no Zoo Crew elements apart from some sound effects.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Chelsea Manning got released from prison and ate pizza.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Chelsea Manning, yeah.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  It's unambiguously good news and also has great lipstick.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm very happy that there's like pictures out in the world now that are like that they don't carry all the weight. They're just like a happy person out in the world. That's good news. I think that's it. We're actually way over time. We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. Control at Delete has a few more episodes left. We are working very hard on a very special final episode. We'll be talking about that more soon. And there's other stuff to listen to as well. Over on the Recode side, Lauren Good, our excellent senior editor, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask. You should definitely check that out. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode, which is essential listening. And my favorite, because I'm a media nerd, Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. All of that is on iTunes. It's on all your favorite podcast apps. Just go to iTunes.com/theverge, leave a review. Give him five

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  stars. Come on. It's Friday. That's why you should give him five stars. And you can tweet at all of us. Paul is FuturePaul. Addie is at TheDextraki. Dieter's at Backlon. Nat, thebesthandle, SimpleSandle, at NatGaren. And I am at Reckless. We love your feedback. Hit us up. Let us know. Like I said at the beginning of the show, we need more Verge podcasts. So I'm very interested in your ideas for what kinds of shows, not just characters, but shows we should have. So let me know. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul.