LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
This is an incredible place with lots
of great stuff being worked on every single day.
Before I worked here, I always wondered
what would it would like to come to the Googleplex,
meet up with a Googler, and have coffee with them, just chat
about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.
And today we're going to do exactly that.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Here's the message.
Would you like to join me for coffee?
ANDREW BRENNER: Reply.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Say your message.
ANDREW BRENNER: Sure.
I'll pick you up.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Sending message.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm getting my coffee
to go today with a Googler who always seems to be on the go.
Andrew Brenner is from the Android automotive team,
and they work on the coolest possible things.
And it looks like he's taking me there in his cool car.
Should we take a look?
Nice wheels, man!
ANDREW BRENNER: Hop in.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
What is this?
ANDREW BRENNER: This is Android Auto
running in this Hyundai Sonata.
LAURENCE MORONEY: What does it do?
ANDREW BRENNER: Let's go get coffee.
Press it right on the screen.
We'll navigate using Google Maps and get coffee.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sweet!
ANDREW BRENNER: So this is my Google Now cards, but only
the ones that are appropriate when I'm driving.
So since I know that we have an appointment
to get coffee right now, I'm going to press this,
and we're going to launch Google Maps.
And now Google Maps is navigating me
on my car screen using the car's GPS, which is much more
accurate, as we go and get coffee.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's even got traffic conditions.
I can see the yellow there.
Sweet.
ANDREW BRENNER: Absolutely.
So it will tell us the estimate of the time that we're going.
LAURENCE MORONEY: This is allowing
you to keep your eyes on the road
and keep your hands on the steering wheel, right?
ANDREW BRENNER: Absolutely.
And Google Maps is updating me where to go next,
and it's the same voice instructions and interface
that you're really kind of used to from your phone.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
Now, this isn't a device that's within the car itself.
This is your phone being extended into the car,
and it's the car [INAUDIBLE].
ANDREW BRENNER: That's right.
So we have some software that's on the car itself
to let the car talk with the phone in this new way.
And so with the software, the phone's
able to broadcast through a wire, a USB cable.
So we also have other apps, too, like Google Music.
So here's Play Music.
And I can hit Play, and I'm now playing music
through my car speakers while I'm navigating.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
ANDREW BRENNER: So you'll see when the next turn comes up,
it will show that on the screen.
If you go back to navigation and do all sorts of cool things
there.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Outstanding.
Nice.
ANDREW BRENNER: Now, I have some other tricks we have here, too.
You want to see some of those?
Bring them on.
We've not only gotten the GPS from the car,
but we also have some of the car buttons.
So there's one button in particular
we thought was really interesting,
which is the steering wheel button.
When I press the steering wheel button and speak into it,
I can talk to Google, and we can ask Google lots of things,
such as, how tall is Stephen Colbert?
AUTOMATED VOICE: Stephen Colbert is 5 feet 10 and 1/2 inches,
or 1.79 meters tall.
ANDREW BRENNER: Pretty accurate, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's from Google.
It's got to be right.
ANDREW BRENNER: So there's some other things
we can ask it, too, like, what's my next appointment, right?
Let's try that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sure.
ANDREW BRENNER: What's my next appointment?
AUTOMATED VOICE: Your next calendar entry
is today at 4:00 PM.
The title is Android Automotive Monthly Update.
ANDREW BRENNER: And I can do other things, as well.
I can also control Google applications.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, one of things
I remember hearing was that, before you joined Google,
you'd actually, like, hacked up your own car
and put a tablet into it.
ANDREW BRENNER: I did.
Long before I got this role at Google,
I was really interested in this.
So I hated the navigation system that was in my car.
So I went one day, and I ripped it out, and I took a Nexus 7,
and it fit in the opening.
So I basically put it in there.
And then I spent a lot of time figuring out
how to do programming to make the Nexus 7
act as if it was a car stereo.
LAURENCE MORONEY: What kind of weird, funny, crazy stuff
happened while you were working?
ANDREW BRENNER: When we first got something working
in a car, the first time, we need to kind of test
our builds everyday to see the stability,
to see if they worked, see the integration
with Google Apps and services.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So you've got to drive somewhere important?
ANDREW BRENNER: I had to drive somewhere important, so
what better thing to do than to drive to get donuts every day?
So I would pile into the car with the engineers,
and some of them would have their laptops open,
and we would say, navigate to the donut shop using
Voice and other methods, such as putting it in Google Now.
And we would go to the donut shop every day
and see what the quality was in the build.
And, of course, we would have to get, like,
about three dozen donuts on the way back,
and the person in the donut shop thought
we were absolutely nuts, because every day there
would be these engineers showing up with their laptops open,
and we would order lots of donuts and leave.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So what happened to all the donuts?
ANDREW BRENNER: They got ingested and put
into the product with love.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's why it's such a sweet product.
ANDREW BRENNER: That's right.
Absolutely.
LAURENCE MORONEY: This isn't a closed system in a car
that only the car manufacturers could put apps on it.
It's Android, so developers, can put apps on it themselves.
ANDREW BRENNER: Yeah.
So what we want to do is to really bring
developers along for the ride with this whole thing, right--
LAURENCE MORONEY: No pun intended.
ANDREW BRENNER: No pun intended, of course.
So we looked at the use cases that people do in their car.
Like, what do people actually do in their car?
And the two things that highlighted to us
that third party developers would be looking at right away
are playing music and being able to get messages
from third party applications.
So you can use APIs that we're releasing
to be able to create an application that
can send messages that come through onto a car screen.
It reads the message to you just like we
showed at the beginning of this video,
and then you can reply via voice.
And that gets sent back to the person using the app that's
on the phone that the developer creates.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, if I'm a developer, and I created that,
how do I get that in the hands of users?
ANDREW BRENNER: So we're going to have a process that's
coming soon with the Play Store where
you can submit your app to the Play Store and publish it,
and it will be able to be on people's phones,
and they just download it through the normal Play Store
channel.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So an app for my car
is just like any other app.
It's like downloading Flappy Bird.
It's like downloading whatever.
ANDREW BRENNER: That's right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it's going to work on my car.
ANDREW BRENNER: It's just on your phone.
But, of course, we're not enabling Flappy Birds
right now.
Maybe when you're parked in the future,
but no games right now when you're driving.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sure.
Sure.
But it's easy as that to get an app, though, into my car.
ANDREW BRENNER: Absolutely.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's awesome.
ANDREW BRENNER: Because it's actually on your phone.
Think of this as a screen that's attached to your phone,
as if you attached your laptop to an external monitor.
That's basically what you're doing here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, obviously the car screen
is a little bit different, and not everybody has access
to a car so they could start developing.
As a dev, I need to be testing it.
Is there some kind of emulation environment?
ANDREW BRENNER: On the site that we'll have a link to,
there's also an SDK emulator, as well, for both messaging
and for media.
So you don't need to buy a car in order to test your app,
and you're able to test and see how the app will run.
And make sure you follow our Android UX guidelines for Auto
before you submit your app to us.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
ANDREW BRENNER: We want to make sure everything is set up
in a good way for users in the car
so there's nothing unexpected when they should be driving.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So I'm a developer.
I can download this SDK today.
I could read the guidelines today.
I can get the emulator today.
There's no reason why I can't extend my app
to make it a fabulous car app, as well as
a phone app or a wear app or that kind of thing.
So why shouldn't I just get started?
I think it's just the greatest thing.
ANDREW BRENNER: Yeah.
I think you should put in the key
and get started and start driving
your app to Android Auto.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Let's hit that accelerator, and off we go.
ANDREW BRENNER: Absolutely.
We use all the puns we can.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Exactly.
ANDREW BRENNER: All right.
You want to get going?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sounds good to me.
ANDREW BRENNER: All right.
Sounds good.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we've gotten our coffee now.
Thanks for joining me for coffee today, Andrew.
And we've see all these great things
that developers can do it within the car using Android Auto.
But how can a developer get started?
How can they just really get building
these kind of really cool apps that you've shown today?
ANDREW BRENNER: If you're a developer,
you can go to developer.android.com today
and download our STK for Auto.
And the documentation will help you
to develop awesome, great car apps.
And we're really looking forward to seeing
what you come up with.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks for spending some time with us
today, and thanks for sharing a coffee with me.
And for everybody else who's watching,
we're going to be doing lots more episodes like this
of "Coffee with a Googler."
If there's any Googlers you'd like to talk to, contact us
on our G+ page, and we'd love to put them in front
of the camera.
Thanks again, and happy coffee.