Google Wants to Be Everywhere With Everyone

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, began by talking about Google’s impressive reach. Seven of its products — including Search, YouTube and Maps — have more than a billion users each. The Android operating system software is on more than two billion devices.

Google’s ambition, as Mr. Pichai and the speakers that followed him made clear, is to knit all those devices and services together. Google users — which means just about everyone, in Google’s vision — will interact with the company all day long and do it so seamlessly that they barely notice it.

The smartphone, which allowed people to slip the chains of the desktop, first pushed Google in this direction. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are now speeding it along.

“In an A.I.-first world, we are rethinking all our products,” Mr. Pichai said.

The future that the company sketched out was one in which people communicate with their Google devices by talking to them rather than typing. And the machines will anticipate trouble without your asking. They will warn you, for instance, that you need to leave for your child’s soccer game 15 minutes early because there is heavy traffic.

Simply pointing a phone at a restaurant would bring up reviews of it. And a search for a small product — a screwdriver, say — in a vast hardware store would be enabled by what Google calls Visual Position Service.

“GPS gets you to the door, and then V.P.S. can get you the exact item you’re looking for,” said Clay Bavor, Google’s virtual reality team leader. With an audio interface, V.P.S. would be a gift to the vision-impaired.

What could possibly stop Google? For one thing, the ambitions of a few competitors.

Google Home, introduced at I/O last year, was rushed out to compete with Amazon’s Echo. While Google does not release sales figures, analysts say Home lags far behind the Echo, which recently announced new features that Home does not have. Perhaps Google can catch up or perhaps Home will become another Google Buzz, a social network that failed a few years ago.

The same caution goes for Google’s efforts in virtual reality. It is developing its first stand-alone headsets, done in partnership with Qualcomm, Lenovo and HTC, which will be released this fall. But Facebook and Samsung already have their own well-publicized V.R. initiatives.

At the end of the keynote, Mr. Pichai discussed a new initiative called Google for Jobs that will pull data from partner sites to making job-hunting easier.

One major job listing site, Indeed, is not one of Google’s partners. Within a few hours of the keynote, the company fired back. “We are happy to see that 13 years after Indeed launched, Google has woken up to the fact that searching for jobs is one of the most important searches in anyone’s life,” said Chris Hyams, the president of Indeed, in a statement.

That makes another battle joined.

Continue reading the main story