Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. Last week on the channel I went
through all the new Google Home and Google Assistant updates that have come
out at Google i/o 2018. This week I had the time, I went through Google's list of
100 items, and I found a number of things that are more smart home or home
automation, or even personal automation sort of features that Google announced.
I'm going to talk about those this week and I'm also going to talk about a
number of things that were announced in the smart home or home automation space.
So let's get going.
The first thing I want to tell you about is called Smart Compose by Gmail. Now if
you have a gmail account today you can go ahead and in the settings of that
application on just on the web you can go ahead and enable what's called the
new Gmail. Once you do that you can go into the settings and enable the
experimental mode or the experimental features. Once you've done that Smart
Compose will start and what it will do is it will over time learn what you type,
learn how you type, learn the phrases you use, and it will continue to develop and
develop especially as Google puts more and more into that feature. But right now
you can go ahead, turn that on. It's not going to be instantly useful for you so
set your expectations, but it will start to develop over time. I've already seen
it a little bit for myself. Something else that Google talked about last week,
it's not directly related to the Google Home. It's actually related to the
Google Assistant and Google Maps. So when you're on the road and you have your
phone sitting there, you have another device with the Google Assistant on it.
You're going to be able to utilize Google Assistant within Google Maps. From
there what you're going to be able to do is send text messages, get the directions
through your voice, things like that, so they're making it easier to use Google
Assistant within the Google Maps interface. As you go ahead and use that
while you drive one other thing that Google says you're going to be able to
do is actually request music while you're in that Google Maps application.
And of course that's going to take one of their services that's connected to
the Google Assistant. At this point now what we saw at Google i/o was that Waymo,
their newer service where they have some cars out there. They're
using the same AI tech that they've deployed all over the place in the Waymo cars and it's giving those cars more capabilities of sensing objects, for
predicting where objects are moving to, and for therefore adjusting
their speed, or just stopping the vehicle completely.
So they're moving closer and closer with the
utilization of AI to having self-driving cars within that Waymo service. Now if
you don't know what Waymo is, it's actually a self-driving car pickup
service. So they will actually pick you up, there's nobody driving, and you're
able to take that car to your destination. So quite a different service
than you might have expected, but I think it's a great application of the AI
technology. There were a lot of new features rolled out for Android P, now
that's going to be the next level of operating system for Android, and within
that is all kinds of what I'll say close to AI upgrades. One of the things that
was rolled out is called App Actions, and what they're trying to do with this is to
predict the action you're going to take as you enter in to an application on
Android. So they're not just trying to open the application for you, it's
basically once you open an application, they take you right to the action that
they think you're about to use. Now I know for myself when I'm opening up an
app in general I'm just going to a couple of screens and then I'm exiting.
So this would be highly highly beneficial for me especially when I'm
going through YouTube comments from you guys. You know I want to go see Google
Adsense or I want to go see Facebook and I want to go to my Facebook page.
These are going to be very very useful things for me and I love the predictive
nuance to this. Something we're seeing much more from a number of car makers is
they're sort of picking a side in terms of either the Amazon Alexa or the Google
Assistant and Volvo has come out and their whole next generation of vehicles,
what they're saying, it will have Google Maps it will have Android Auto and it
will have the Google Assistant on board. One of the things that I thought was
great in the whole Google i/o was all of the different new features within Google
Photos I think that's a relatively underused application
and when you combine it with things like the Google cloud services
that they have, Google photos is a relatively powerful application. So
what they've gone ahead is they have basically integrated some of their AI
capability or what they're calling machine learning, and they've gone ahead
and created suggested actions. The piece that struck me during their presentation
this year was the capability for you to go and as soon as you've taken a picture
it would recognize who you might want to share that with and then give you that
option right up on the screen instantaneously. You weren't having to
think oh maybe I want to share this with my friend. It was instantly there for you
and it was a one tap share. So stuff like that. They also had things like brighten, rotate, etc..
If they thought that if the machine learning thought that the picture needed
to be rotated, those actions would show up instantaneously. Now moving on to
things that weren't necessarily announced at Google i/o, there is a
second generation of the new Chromecast. So this would be what I call the third
generation of the chromecast planned it will have the Bluetooth capability. So
this is coming from an FCC filing that Google has made. What they are saying
through their filing is that your existing Chromecast is not going to get
the update, and there's some reasons for that I won't go into, but basically your
new Google Chromecast, you're gonna have to go out and upgrade if you want the Bluetooth
capability on that. Some other things announced Philips Hue has put out a new
app and it's supposed to simplify your lighting features it's supposed to
simplify the entire app. I think if you've been a Philips Hue user for a
while, I think you know that the app in general is a little bit clunky, so it's
good to see these updates. It's getting good reviews.
We don't have it up here in Canada yet so I can't tell you firsthand how that
experience is but I can tell you that Philips Hue has put out the new
application with all the new layout and the
new functionality. Something that you're going to see on the channel here really
soon is called the WyzeCam 2. Now this is a $20 USD smart home camera that you
can go you can purchase if you're in the u.s.. I had to import mine here to Canada
but they work great here. The app is available internationally and so I have
that working in my home today. I actually have a couple in my home now. One thing
about the Wyzecam is it didn't have a lot of integration capabilities, so the
good news this week is that Wyzecam2 is now capable of integrating with IFTTT
So that's gonna give us all of the functionality that we've ever
wanted. You're going to be able to do all kinds of things within that framework.
Something else that's interesting to me is when we get these old smart home or
home automation systems like Insteon coming in and getting some more
interactivity with our other home automation devices. So Insteon has
actually announced through Yonomi that they have support through the
Yonomi app and now this is giving us capability of connecting more devices to
our old Insteon that we might have around the house. I'm someone who has a
couple of those devices, so here in the future, I'm going to use that
functionality to integrate it with my other systems. Alright so that's all
the new smart home functionality I have. Of course there's a subscribe button
coming at the end of this video. Thanks everyone for watching. We'll see you next time.