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TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's time to talk about Android Things.
I'm Timothy Jordan.
And I'm standing here with Vince, a product
manager on Android Things.
VINCE WU: Hi.
How you doing?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: How you doing, man?
VINCE WU: Good.
Very good.
It's a big moment for us today.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah, let's talk about that.
There was an announcement.
What was it?
VINCE WU: Android Things 1.0.
So we're ready.
We're ready for business.
We've been working on this for quite a while,
and now we're available for people
to make commercial products.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Is that what it means to come out
of developer preview?
VINCE WU: Oh, yes.
So we have a full solution for going from prototype
all the way to production.
So if you take one of our supported hardware modules,
you can build very interesting stuff.
And in fact, we've actually put it
through its paces, tried it out for real
with a couple of large and small OEMs.
And we have built really cool products.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Let's talk about that.
This whole prototype to production thing,
that full spectrum is relatively unique in the field of IoT,
right?
VINCE WU: Oh, yes.
If we're talking about prototyping on microcontroller,
microprocessor SoCs, you've got tons of solutions
out there to do that.
But those solutions don't take you to production, let alone
commercial launch.
So that's what's different with our solution.
The other thing is long-term guaranteed support.
So we offer security patches and stability fixes
for the long-term.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Now, behind us is actually a demonstration, really,
of prototype to production.
Can you tell me a little bit about what's right there?
VINCE WU: Oh, yes.
Oh, wow, this was a really, really fun project for us.
So at the time, a lot of partners
were interested in building a new product
category called smart displays.
And they want to do this really quickly.
And they thought that we could help them out.
This was really fun, because we started out
with literally a Lego demo.
And this is exactly what we showed the partners.
What's in there is our system module,
the solution with Android Things running.
And we got this up and running in just a couple of weeks.
It was really, really fast.
It shows the power of Android and the flexibility
of the platform.
What they were really interested,
also, was they were expecting that this
would be a product that would be updated a lot.
Because it's a new product category,
they weren't sure how the users would react to it.
So there's a lot of A/B testing, putting people
into different groups.
And the app for Android Things solution helped them do that.
And as you can see through here, it
went from literally Lego prototypes all the way
to the real product.
And we made this a little bit hard on ourselves.
We didn't want to just build one product,
but we wanted to build multiple of them.
So we have products from JPL, LG, and Lenovo.
And if you look inside, what's really cool
is that they all use the same system module, which
allows us to scale quickly and go to production really,
really fast.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And you've got some other cool stuff
in the sandbox that you can play with built on Android Things.
And I think one of my favorites is these flowers that
are using TensorFlow Lite.
Can you tell me how they work?
VINCE WU: Oh, yeah.
So this is, of course, serious stuff
with real stuff on shelves.
But we also wanted to inspire the developer community,
and so we built a bunch of demos,
just maybe a little bit whimsical,
but it does showcase the technology.
So for example, we have ML flowers.
It's running machine learning on-device,
so it's totally offline.
None of it goes to the cloud.
It does detection of the facial expressions-- so happy, sad.
It also detects your face, so it follows you around.
We also have ones detecting handwriting, et cetera.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Very cool.
VINCE WU: It's a cool time.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And can you tell me a little bit more
about the technology behind that, TensorFlow
running on the device?
VINCE WU: Oh, yes.
So all of it is running on-device.
So you must have heard the earlier announcement
around Firebase ML Kit.
So all of that stuff works on Android Things,
as it does on Android, of course.
For the demos that we built, we took some of the existing
models that we had in Google Research,
and we put them onto the devices.
And it basically just works.
There's quite a few models to play around with.
The most obvious one, of course, is photo detection.
We showed that last year.
What's different this year is that it's not just photos,
but it's actually live video.
So it's all in real time, taking a video of you,
and detecting the facial expressions,
tracking your face, and all that.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Vince, if you want to get started with Android Things,
where do you go?
VINCE WU: Go to androidthings.withgoogle.com.
You'll get everything there.
And if you're at I/O, go pick yourself a kit,
and let's go build some hardware.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thank you, so much.
I'm Timothy Jordan, and this is "I/O Live."
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