Thursday, June 1, 2017

Thoughts on Google I/O 2016 Keynote

So, I watched the Google I/O 2016 Keynote. As usual, my thoughts are different from other people, so it's worth writing them down.
  • Music: those were some cool people in the beginning. But Google can't find their music, and they have no credits in the schedule. What gives?
  • Intro movie: reasonable, I guess it was a spin on the play store. Dubstep's still not my thing.
  • Knowledge Graph: still not useful enough to disambiguate "simon haskell" into "simon peyton jones" and "simon marlow". And considering the reasons for the removal of the 'phonebook' operator, I'm not sure it ever will.
  • Machine learning: it's (mostly) open source, no real objections here
  • Buying from movie theaters: Is this still a thing, in 2016? What's wrong with Netflix? I assume Netflix can give much better movie recommendations than Google (although it would be nice to have competition), and unlike Google there aren't any difficulties with availability.
  • Ordering food: the ordering part is ok, but I'd rather have it show up as a persistent notification than as a text bubble
  • Google Home: The majority of examples there should be automated; telling a speaker to turn on the lights every morning is tedious. The flight planning stuff and sensor control seems like it would work better with a touchscreen.
  • Allo: the intelligent completion should be in the system-wide keyboard, rather than the messaging app. Too late now I guess.
  • Duo: same here, improve the platform rather than the app
  • Watch: sounds like watches are the new phones. but do they make calls?

No comments:

Post a Comment