[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Oh!
BRAD ABRAMS: Hey, Timothy.
How's it going?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's going great.
This is Brad Abrams.
Brad is a product manager on Assistant.
BRAD ABRAMS: That's right.
Yes.
How's it going, Timothy?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's going great.
Now that you're here and I'm here,
I think we should talk about the Assistant.
What do you think?
BRAD ABRAMS: I think that sounds like a great idea,
because it's the only thing I know to talk about, so perfect.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right.
Let's start with square one.
BRAD ABRAMS: OK.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What is Assistant?
And why is it cool for developers?
BRAD ABRAMS: Well, the Assistant is really
a conversational interface to Google.
It's the smart brain in your Google Home
or on your Android phone.
And actually, at this event we just launched on iOS as well.
And you can have really a conversation with Google
to help you get things done.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
What are the different services for developers
to integrate with?
BRAD ABRAMS: Oh, great, so there's
a couple different ways.
One, you can extend the Assistant
by adding your own custom apps to the Assistant.
And then, you can also host the Assistant in different devices.
So if you're building your own hardware,
whatever, you can host your Assistant there.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And that's the difference
between actions on Google and the Assistant SDK, right?
BRAD ABRAMS: Exactly.
So the Assistant SDK is where you host it with your hardware,
and actions on Google is extending the Assistant.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK.
Well, we're at I/O. And I know some new stuff
has been announced.
Whey don't you tell us about some of your favorites.
BRAD ABRAMS: Oh man, it's hard to pick.
There are so many.
I'm really excited about actions on Google coming to phones--
to Android and iOS.
So up until this event, you could only
build actions on Google for home-- for eyes only experience
or eyes free experience.
And now we have actions on Google for the phone as well.
So we have suggestion chips, lists, image carousels.
And it could really give you a deep multimodal experience.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Would you mean like seeing and hearing?
BRAD ABRAMS: That's right.
You can see and hear.
Yeah.
We also launched Transactions.
So you can buy things via the Assistant.
I think that'll help users a lot.
I know I want to buy a pizza, you know, from my phone.
I can just say, OK, Google.
I want a pizza.
And it can connect me to somebody to go do that.
And for developers it also gives,
you know, a financial incentive, which
I hear some developers like to get paid.
So--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Indeed they do.
BRAD ABRAMS: And then of course deep for
me is developer experience.
And we've done a lot of work.
We launched the platform first in December.
And we've done a lot of work on developer experience.
So we launched a new version of the Developer Console.
We call it the actions console.
Developers can use that to work better in teams
together, to get deep analytics about their application.
As well as-- it integrates really well with the Firebase
and Google Cloud consoles.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
BRAD ABRAMS: And can I do one more?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Absolutely.
BRAD ABRAMS: See I can just add them.
So one more would be discoverability.
I think that's been--
in the whole kind of chatbox space,
generally having people be able discover
them has been a problem.
And so we've done a lot of work in that regard.
The first is that we have a new directory for our apps.
And it's right there on the Assistant surface,
just one tap away.
And you can see a category view of all the Assistant
apps that are there.
We also gave you a way to get a web URL into that.
So if you wanted to promote your app via your enormous Twitter
followers, you could totally go do that, which is awesome.
And of course, people who love your Assistant app
can share it with their friends via the deep link.
And finally, we did some work to help
discover when to invoke your Assistant app from information
in the directory, other information
provided by the developer.
We can just respond to queries like, play a game.
And we can actually find the right system apps
to go trigger in that case.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's totally awesome.
BRAD ABRAMS: Yeah, it's really fun.
It's kind of a big release for us here at I/O.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah, I mean that's a lot
of different stuff.
BRAD ABRAMS: Yes, it certainly is-- certainly is.
But I think it comes together in a really cohesive package
though, because you know, if you're
going to do Transactions-- you're going to buy things--
a lot of times having a visual surface to see
the different options, see the cart
and what not really helps with that.
And then of course, if you're going
to have a financial interest there,
being able to have people discover your Assistant apps
really helps.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
OK, so let's take a step back.
And I would love to hear your thoughts
just on conversational interfaces in general.
BRAD ABRAMS: Yeah, I mean--
if you think about this evolution that's
been happening, you know, like when I started using computers,
it was like a mouse and keyboard.
It was very indirect, right?
You moved--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Wait, you had a mouse?
BRAD ABRAMS: I did have a mouse.
You don't think I had a mouse?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Well, I mean, you know,
you start with like the Commodore 128.
BRAD ABRAMS: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
OK.
Before, you had a keyboard.
And then, we added a mouse.
But these are indirect.
Like, you do something with your hands and something
happens on the screen.
And then, you know, we got capacitive touch, right?
So you could actually touch the screen.
And like, my kid when he was two knew
how to touch the screen, right?
Like, that was very intuitive.
And I think we're at the verge of making the next step.
And that is, rather than just being
able to like touch the button, what if I could just
express what I want.
Why do I have to dig through a bunch menus,
find the right button to press?
Not really sure what's going to happen
when I press that button.
But what if I could just express my idea?
This is what I want to happen.
I want to play this game.
I want to order this pizza.
I want to do whatever.
And that's what I think this conversational interface is
enabling.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
And I do want to say that I think one of the things that's
been holding us as developers back from that
is the right tooling to do so.
BRAD ABRAMS: You know--
you know, as I described that, I think that developers
are going like, wow.
Sure, but how do I do that when the user--
how?
If you think about the huge number of ways people
could say they want a pizza, order toppings on a pizza,
how can they turn the huge vagaries of human language
into something a developer can understand?
And that's where tools like API.AI
can really come into play.
API.AI is our own conversation building tool.
And what it does is let's you as developers define intents,
just by giving us some example phrases
of what a user would say.
And then, we can do--
pull out the entities from that, and do the natural language
understanding, so that we can do slot filling
and actually figure out what users are saying.
So you might give an example like, I want a large pepperoni
pizza with tomato sauce as your example.
We know large is the entity.
Pepperoni is an entity.
And tomato sauce is an entity.
We can actually pull those out and then recognize
other queries like, I want a small pizza with tomatoes
and green olives with no sauce.
And that-- because we can do that,
it makes it much more tractable for developers
to actually understand human language.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: But seriously, how many times have you
ordered a pizza with no sauce?
BRAD ABRAMS: Well, you know, that's pretty rare.
But you know, I actually I'm for extra sauce,
you know, just because it dribbles down your face.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Oh, OK, that's good.
BRAD ABRAMS: And that's beautiful.
I'm sorry, we got to cut that out.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right, is there anything
else you would say about Assistant or any the developer
tools before we go?
BRAD ABRAMS: No, I think we pretty much covered it.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right, Brad, thanks so much.
BRAD ABRAMS: All right, thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]