Transcript

Brian 00:00:00 When you have control over the full stack, you can choose the hardware, you can optimize the silicon, and you write all the software. There's really no excuse, there's no limitation. You can continue to refine and optimize in the way that makes the very best set of features for your customers.

Voiceover 00:00:17 Welcome to the Made by Google Podcast, where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host Rachid Finge.

Rachid 00:00:26 Today we're meeting with Brian Rakowski, a Google veteran who is the product manager for all our Pixel phones, but we're talking about all the products we launched at Made by Google this year.

Voiceover 00:00:36 This is the Made by Google Podcast.

Rachid 00:00:38 Welcome everyone to season six of the Made by Google podcast. It's great to be back just after wrapping up the highly anticipated Made by Google event here in Mountain View and what better way to start off the season and talking about Made by Google with none other than our own Brian Rakowski. Brian, it's great to have you on.

Brian 00:00:56 Thanks for having me. I've been hoping to get on for a while, so I'm very excited to be here this morning.

Rachid 00:01:01 Well, it's a pleasure to have you. Now, Brian, as you know in the Made by Google Podcast, we check out our guests in the internal directory that we got here and it simply says, in your case, Product Manager Pixel Mobile. Could you tell everyone what that entails?

Brian 00:01:14 Yeah, sure. I'm in charge of the product management side of our Pixel devices. That means I help define our phones, tablets, watches, and hearables and then make sure our users are happy with them.

Rachid 00:01:29 I'm reading in a directory that you've been at Google for 22 years, so that means starting out back in 2002 long before Pixel, what was your first job at Google?

Brian 00:01:39 I started as an associate product manager. I was the very first associate product manager Google hired and my responsibility was to work on Gmail. It had already been kicked off as a 20% project inside Google. It was called Caribou at the time. That was our internal code name and it was about six engineers and part of a product manager's time. Marissa Meyer was the one who hired me and she was spending about 10% of her time on it. So she said, well, you know, why don't you take a look at this. You mentioned in your interviews you were really excited about email and I was ecstatic. I couldn't believe there was an internal email product happening that I got to work on. I was also surprised because at that point there were no products outside except for search. So I was a little bit alarmed but also very excited that I would get to work on something like that.

Rachid 00:02:27 And of course then 2002, that's 14 years before Google Pixel was around. How did you eventually transition into hardware?

Brian 00:02:36 Yeah, I've been working in software basically my whole career. Until then, I had been working in the Android team and we had built a few Nexus devices and then we decided that we should shift our strategy a bit and take more end-to-end control to make the experience better. So we started building Pixel devices still in the Android team and then sometime during that first year, the hardware product area at Google was founded and I eventually moved into the hardware pa not knowing anything about hardware, uh, but it was one of many jobs that I was unqualified for when I got hired and then got to learn a lot on the job thanks to some really amazing coworkers.

Rachid 00:03:17 Can we zoom in a little bit on that origin story of Pixel? You mentioned making the product experience better for our users. What are sort of other reasons why we started Pixel and are still doing it so many years later?

Brian 00:03:29 Yeah, from the very beginning we had an insight that artificial intelligence was changing what would be possible with computing in general and mobile phones being the most used form of computing, we thought there's gonna be some great opportunities for us to build features that would otherwise be impossible to build unless we could carefully select the hardware, design the hardware, and then build the software on top of it. And the first real example of that is the camera. We were able to carefully choose the right camera components, the right SOC silicon to run our algorithms on and then go deeper and deeper. And one of the first areas of big innovation on Pixel was computational photography where we used software techniques to improve the images that you get off the camera and that was a pretty big revolution. The industry has changed quite a bit since the team started down that path and I'm really proud of how awesome the pictures are that come off our cameras

Rachid 00:04:32 Now we'll talk about this year's hardware in a moment, including Gemini as well. Would you say that back in 2016 there was already some sort of inkling that AI would be this powerful and this important on a mobile phone?

Brian 00:04:45 You know, it's hard to say that we knew exactly how it was going to evolve. I don't think that would be a fully true statement, but as technologists, I think our engineering team in particular saw the opportunities to create new features based on these new techniques. And while we didn't know exactly how it would evolve, we knew there would be a lot of change and a lot of new opportunities to rethink the way things had been done. And you know, I just get so excited about trying to find ways to make all of our day-to-day interactions with our phones and computers a little bit easier. There's so many moments of frustration that we don't even realize because phones are so amazing. They let us do stuff that we couldn't even dream of doing five, 10 years ago. But then you step back and you're like, oh, this is actually kind of cumbersome and a little bit tedious. Can we use clever software tricks to make this easier or automate some of this or do a little bit more for the user or present it in a way that's more natural?

Rachid 00:05:44 I think this year we had a spectacular Made by Google event maybe much different to the first one. I remember October 4th, 2016. Were you there and could you bring us back to that day? What were the sort of expectations and what were you doing there that day?

Brian 00:05:58 I was there, I remember it very well. I was very nervous. I had to do some live demos on stage of the original Google Assistant. Uh, I was working on the software side of that first Pixel phone and I was getting ready to go on stage. I had two associate product managers. That's the same role that I started in helping me get the demos ready and prep all the demo devices backstage with me. And I remember being so nervous that I would have to present in front of so many people. In retrospect, it was a tiny auditorium in San Francisco but you know, it was our first time and I was and still not the most comfortable public speaker so I'm glad we made it through. But yeah, we've had some wonderful announcements over the years with our Made by Google event. It's usually in October this year we're able to bring it a little bit earlier in the year. So I'm very excited about that.

Rachid 00:06:48 Yeah, I'm sure that was a surprise for many people in the outside world. Like wait, this is happening in August. Can you explain what prompted the change? Yeah,

Brian 00:06:55 We've always wanted to get our new devices out a little bit earlier in the year to give people a chance to experience them early, try to get them in the hands of users sooner in the smartphone business there are a lot of sales that happen towards the end of the year and being there earlier in the season gives people a chance to think about the phone they want to buy.

Rachid 00:07:18 So let's talk about the Made by Google event of this year. I think we had seven new products and the first time that uh, Gemini was heavily featured of course. So where do we start when we want to recap what we announced? Maybe we start with the phones. Sure.

Brian 00:07:31 Very excited about the phones this year. They have an all new look. The design has been updated. They still have that iconic Pixel camera bar but it has a very different look and we designed the phone around that camera bar. I think people will really love it. The glass is flat on the front and the back and the sides are squared off to go with that camera bar. Look, we've really designed everything inspired by the camera bar. The benefit of the design is not only the way it looks but it feels great when you hold it and it also is twice as durable as our previous generation phones. The last phones were already quite durable but now they're much more resilient to accidental drops.

Rachid 00:08:11 Now we'll get into the design much deeper uh, in a few weeks time when you have a special episode about that. But I'm just wondering for you as the product manager, when is the first time that you see that new device or are you seeing sort of iterations of that new design and it's sort of a maybe a natural transition from the previous generation?

Brian 00:08:29 Yeah, we have a fabulous design team and they like to keep their work a little bit under wraps until it's ready to be seen by broader audience and it's kind of natural

Rachid 00:08:41 And that includes you as well, the broader audience

Brian 00:08:43 That includes me, although if you're wiley you can sneak into the design lab and sometimes get a glimpse of what they're working on. But we usually do see some early revs of the design and a few different variants and then we kind of down select to the ones that we think have the most promise. Obviously there can be engineering constraints and fitting all the components into the phone and the arrangement that will work for the design and look beautiful. And then there's just so many iterations, so many models built so many different looks and adjustments made to ensure that the colors look great with the finishes, the different textures, the different radiuses on the curves, all those things get fine tuned with really laborious attention to detail. And I think the result is really nice. You constantly see little things in the phone, they're like, oh that was really nicely thought through somebody really put some thought into that.

Rachid 00:09:40 Now we got from Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro to a Pixel 9, a Pixel 9 Pro, but now also a Pixel 9 Pro XL. So there are three phones rather than two. An announcement made by Google when it comes to the Pixel 9 series. What was the thinking to introduce that third model and do you remember when that sort of discussion started happening?

Brian 00:10:01 Yes, the two sizes of pro with no compromise and features is something that we have been really excited to deliver this year. We heard it from our users, our friends, our family members, our colleagues. And since the very first pro device that we built, the Pixel 6 Pro, we had people coming up and I remember very, very distinctly colleagues and friends and family members saying, I like the pro, I want all the pro functionality but it's just too big. I'm a small phone person, I want a smaller version. Can you make a smaller version? And that was quite a challenge because you need to pack all that capability and all those cameras into a smaller package. So it took us a while to get to the place where we believed we could do it at high quality and this year we've got something really good. I've been using that one now for months and battery life is excellent, the camera is amazing, it fits in your pocket or a bag much more easily. So I just couldn't be happier with the result.

Rachid 00:11:01 When I talk about Pixel at Google, I'm hearing a lot about owning the full stack and from what you just said, it sounds like that's really paying off this year. Could you explain what the full stack means and why it's so incredibly important to us that we own the full stack?

Brian 00:11:16 Yeah, the full stack I guess is a little bit of industry jargon, but what it really means is we're able to fix and optimize end-to-end every single feature and experience. If you don't have control over the full stack, there are things that are just out of your control. Uh, you might not be able to fix a bug or you might not be able to tune the performance of an experience in the way that is best. The camera might not be able to record the highest quality video, but when you have control over the full stack, you can choose the hardware, you can optimize the silicon and you write all the software. There's really no excuse, there's no limitation. You can continue to refine and optimize in the way that makes the very best set of features for your customers.

Rachid 00:12:06 That sounds to me like it means we're doing all of it ourselves and I'm sure we'll reveal more of the benefits throughout our conversation. So now we've talked about three new devices. I think next in line is the Pixel 9 Pro fold, our second foldable. What changed in a product category that's still so young?

Brian 00:12:23 Yeah, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is such an amazing device. If I have to pick a favorite device, that would be it because of its versatility and the huge improvements we've made year over year and the challenges that the team has solved, you know, in particular it's the thinnest foldable, it's the biggest screen on a foldable when you open it up, it's lighter than last year it and it's just such a versatile device. The aspect ratio has changed slightly so that it is more of a traditional phone form factor when it's closed, but when you open it up you get that really big eight inch display and for me that's incredibly helpful for productivity. You can open slides or sheets or docs and you can multitask on it. You can, you know, chat while you're watching a video. It's really good for watching basketball games, uh, or even in multi-view. So that display is really versatile and the fact that it's so pocketable, it's barely thicker than a traditional phone one folded just makes it an incredibly helpful device, especially for someone who's on their phone a lot and doesn't always want to bring their computer with them.

Rachid 00:13:30 I think an amazing and fun feature of the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold is to make you look and maybe you can describe what that looks like for people who haven't seen it. I'm just really curious how that came to be. It's such a creative idea and it really solves a problem for parents with young children.

Brian 00:13:47 Yeah, that's exactly right and you nailed the motivation. I think many of the team members here have small young children, babies or toddlers and if you've ever tried to take a picture of a baby or toddler, getting them to look at the screen, uh, getting them to look at the camera is quite a challenge. They're just not interested in being photographed. They've got other stuff going on and you end up, you know, having to swallow your pride and make goofy faces and noises at them to try to get them to look at the right moment when you're pressing the shutter button. So the unique capability of the foldable is that the really awesome triple camera system on the back of the device when opened also has a screen beside it. The front screen becomes facing your subject to your baby in this case and we can use that screen to attract their attention. So made you look is this cool capability when you open the phone and put it in camera mode, you can choose made you look and then you can select from a set of animated characters that also make some funny noises and it attracts the attention of the little ones and you can snap the picture at just the right moment and get that wonderful shot. I sure wish I had it when my kids were younger, uh, 'cause I have a lot of pictures of them looking the wrong direction and very uninterested.

Rachid 00:15:04 I guess from here the devices only get tinier so maybe we go to the Pixel Watch next third generation. Okay, so we did announce a slightly larger one 45 millimetres. We kept the 41 around as well. Again, how do you decide that 45 and not 44 or 46 are sort of the right size for a larger smartwatch?

Brian 00:15:23 Yeah, one of the things that is so amazing about our hardware team is the research capability that we have and for the watch there were so many studies done of wrist size and customer preference to find the sweet spot for both sizes and it's quite clear if you look at the data and there's tons and tons of data collected that there's a bimodal distribution of wrist size and consumer preference that roughly matches the wrist size. There of course are people who want a big watch on a small wrist and vice versa, but by and large wrist size really does correlate to the size of watch people want and there was a lot of demand for that bigger watch. The great thing about the watch is you don't have to compromise on functionality. All the sensors are packed into both of them. You do get 35% bigger battery on the large watch if you're one of the large watch people and that's quite nice. But there's just so many improvements overall to battery life and Pixel Watch 3 across the software and the silicon and the battery itself that I think everyone's going to be really happy with the battery life you get from it.

Rachid 00:16:37 What would you say is your favorite feature on Pixel Watch 3?

Brian 00:16:40 The loss of pulse detection is such an amazing feature. When the team started thinking about that, it seemed unlikely that we would be able to build such a feature but the foundation of really accurate heart rate tracking enables us to do things like loss of pulse, which is so helpful. There are so many situations where you might be by yourself when you're, you might have a heart problem or you know anything from overdose to heart attack, you, you might, your heart might stop beating and every single minute is critical there. And the fact that we're able to detect that and some emergency help, I just can't wait to get that to as many people as possible including friends and loved ones just to make sure that we have extra peace of mind and hopefully they never need it. But if they do, it could be really literally life changing.

Brian 00:17:31 Just like with Car Crash Detection, we found ways to work with car crash laboratories and put watches on test dummies. Now we were able to work with clinicians who are doing procedures where they're stopping someone's heart momentarily and they'll use the watch to see if it accurately detects that moment or not. Uh, and of course we have lots of internal testers making sure that it doesn't misfire in the other direction saying there's no pulse when there is, but the true positives are the ones that are harder to test. But luckily due to some clever team members able to figure that out.

Rachid 00:18:09 Definitely a proud achievement for the team I'm sure. Now last but not least, before we get into Gemini Pixel Buds Pro 2, now this seems a hard one to me because I remember there were reviewers with the uh, first generation Pixel Buds Pro who basically said in the first sentence, these are the buds to get. That's the end of my video. Please subscribe. So how do you improve from that?

Brian 00:18:29 Yeah, The Pixel Buds Pro were a really great product. They were smaller and had great noise cancellation, great audio fidelity, and good battery life. The case is just such a satisfying little egg that fits into your pocket. The open and close of the thing is such a nice fidget too. But there were some areas that we set off to improve and in particular people's ears are immensely variable. Not only the size but the shape of the ears. It's incredibly diverse, it's more diverse I think than fingerprint and we set off to try to do a better job of fitting more ears. Already we fit the middle part of the distribution of ear size and shape, but we wanted to stretch it out to get even further into the longer tail. And if you can build earbuds that fit both my ears and my wife's ears, you've done something right because I think we're on opposite ends of the distribution of ear size and shape.

Brian 00:19:24 And the team built the capability to do 3D ear scans of many, many volunteers to understand the anatomy of the ear and then using modelling techniques figure out what shape would be ideal for fitting those buds in more people's ears comfortably and in a stable way so they're not falling out. And the fact that they fit twice as well based on uh, third party assessment as the leading earbuds and they fall out half as often is quite amazing. Uh, really proud of what the team was able to do there and that's not just figuring out the right shape but it's also being able to shrink the design in all the right dimensions. And that of course required us to re-engineer everything there quite a bit smaller than the previous generation. Quite a bit lighter and the battery life is still amazing. So between the long battery life and the smaller size, thanks to the first generation custom silicon in there with even better noise cancellation, they're just head and shoulders above what we've built in the past and I'm really excited for people to get them.

Rachid 00:20:36 You mentioned, you know, starting our AI journey with Pixel back in 2016, that's with computational photography. Now we're in the Gemini era. How would you say Gemini helps lift the Pixel portfolio?

Brian 00:20:49 Yeah, Gemini is such an amazing new set of models and capabilities. Pixel is the first phone to run Gemini Nano with multimodality on the device. That's thanks in part to the co-design between DeepMind and Tensor. And as a user I think you probably don't really care about what all this AI stuff does or what it is or how it works, but what you really care about is what it does for you. And there are so many opportunities in the day-to-day flow of using a phone that can be made better with a language model like Gemini. Uh, in particular screenshots. All of us take screenshots, some of us more than others. I take tons and tons of screenshots of stuff to try to help me remember stuff and the fact that there can be a language model that can then understand the content of the screenshot and help me find it when I need it later is just such a small but helpful moment in my life.

Brian 00:21:46 So for instance, I'll take a screenshot of an itinerary for a trip and I often can't remember exactly what time my flight is or what, where the address of the hotel is, but then I can just ask when am I going to Amsterdam and it will respond with the dates. I don't even have to see the screenshot, it can show me the answer from the screenshot. So just small things like that become so helpful being able to do smart replies in Gboard thanks to Gemini running on the device. We also increase the memory in all of our phones so that we can keep Gemini available and ready to answer questions for you. So something like Gboard comes up all the time in different situations and you want it to be fast and available with answers. So the fact that we can do a smart reply in Gboard without having to wait for the model to be loaded into memory is such a critical opportunity and capability to make your life just a little bit easier when you're trying to compose a message.

Rachid 00:22:41 You mentioned Gemini Nano with Multimodality. Now we could do some sort of a like a Wikipedia story on what that means and what it does, but maybe we can talk about like what are things, maybe you can mention one or two things that Pixel can do that it couldn't have done without Gemini, Nano with Multimodality, maybe that way we can sort of understand what it's good for.

Brian 00:23:00 We have a new feature this year called Call notes, which when you activate it, it tells everyone on the line that the call is being recorded and then using the on-device model it will create a transcript of the call and also a summary. So that's really useful for me when I'm talking to you know, a mechanic or a contractor or a doctor or someone who's got expertise in an area that sometimes goes out of my realm, I can put that on and then I can go refer back to some of the details, whether it's a quote for a repair or details about something that I need to go read up on to make a decision. Having that summary and then the full transcript to dive into is just a really, really helpful thing and a really good time saver. It all happens on a device which is important to make sure that you know, everyone can feel comfortable that it's not leaving your device, it's not going somewhere where it can be intercepted by someone else that's under your control. And um, you know, it makes for a really useful feature that provides just another convenience in the day-to-day of making phone calls on the phone.

Rachid 00:24:02 So you mentioned when we started Pixel it was because we wanted to create a better user experience. We are in Pixel 9 now. Who is this phone for?

Brian 00:24:11 In general? I think Pixel is such a great phone for people who just wanna be more efficient, they wanna get more stuff done with less frustration. All the conveniences that come with Rethinking Day-to-Day experiences with new techniques, whether it be the latest in computational photography or new large language model capabilities makes all these things just a little bit easier. It used to be that the reason to buy the Pixel was for the camera and that's still true today. We have the best video on any smartphone with our pro phones thanks to Video Boost and a lot of the work that we did to improve the overall video pipeline And really I get some amazing videos off the Pixel Pro, especially in Low Light, which is awesome. Uh, I also get some amazing panoramas from our family vacations because now that also does Night Sight in Panorama mode so you can get some of these great low light panoramas, but there's also all these daily conveniences, whether it be keep automatically creating a grocery list for you to call notes, transcribing your call or call assist and call screen answering calls for you. Gboard makes typing so much easier whether it be the proofreading feature or the smart reply feature or just the voice transcription, which is second to none. All these things just make you a little bit more efficient with your phone and because people use their phone so much it really adds up.

Rachid 00:25:45 You mentioned Video Boost, which still blows my mind in many ways. Do you remember the sort of first low light video you took?

Brian 00:25:52 I do remember, I remember it very clearly. I decided to try it out one night. We had a block party, a neighborhood picnic and the party was almost over. It was getting dark outside and my son picked up a soccer ball and started playing with one of the neighbor kids and kicking it against a fence and the other kid was playing goalie and I decided like, oh this is a good opportunity to try low light video. So I recorded a few videos of him doing that and through the viewfinder you really couldn't see anything. You could see like maybe the ball was kind of neon green so you can kind of see a glimpse of it. But it was, you know, pretty much a throwaway video. A few hours later I got the boosted result and it was incredible. You could see exactly the form of the kicks, you could see the goalie trying to stop the ball, you could see the ball bouncing off the fence when he got through in great detail.

__Brian 00:26:44 __ And it was just mind blowing, the same mind blowing experience when I first saw night vision for stills that you could take pictures that were actually, you know, better than what you could see in the room because of the light gathering capabilities and the computational photography approach. So that was really quite amazing this year we added some of that capability to zoom in the night site video boost. So I took some lowlight videos at a concert this year that I visited at the Mountain winery and the resulting quality of those videos is, it looks like I was there. Uh, it's, it's really amazing and those are the kind of videos that are so hard to get in a low light outdoor music venue with different lighting conditions and variable lighting conditions too as the stage changes. So quite amazing the breakthroughs that have happened in video over the last year.

Rachid 00:27:38 You know, Brian, I always love talking about the future as well, which of course is kind of hard for us. You know, we just launched these products but we're working on the future every day of course. Maybe I can put this as a yes or no question. Are you already working on sort of Video Boost level features in terms of mind blowing this, if that's a word that you're already working on that we will see maybe in one or two years?

Brian 00:28:03 Yeah, there are so many things that are happening behind the scenes and you know, some of them work out and some of them you know, end up taking a few more years to perfect. We're pushing the envelope on a lot of different dimensions of limitations and frustrations that you have every day with your phone. Some of them AI amazingly solves the problem quite quickly. Some of them take more research and more insights to get right, but there are a lot of things that will change over the next few years. And one of the cool things is we have a really good track record of bringing those features to our existing phones, uh, with feature drops. So every few months we'll release new features to our existing phones based on what our research teams have come up with. And that's one of my favorite things about giving a Pixel to a friend or family member because there's constantly new improvements, new things for them to learn, new features for them to experience. We want people to keep their phones for as long as they want to and we also want them to, if they want the latest and greatest, hand it down to someone, it's good for us, it's good for the environment if people keep using their Pixels as long as possible. So we're gonna do our very best to keep them supported. We now offer seven years of OS and security updates with all of our phones. That's quite a long time and quite a commitment to make sure that your phone keeps getting better over time.

Rachid 00:29:32 So very soon people will have their hands on our new products. I imagine for a product manager that is very cool but maybe also a little bit nerve wracking, like what are they gonna say? Well they love what we did because you put your heart and soul in there so much time and effort. What's that like that day? Maybe the first reviews pop up or you hear friends and family uh, talking about your products as they get to try it in themselves?

Brian 00:29:56 To be honest, it's almost a hundred percent excitement. We've done so much testing and we've all lived with these phones, watches, and buds for quite an extended testing period and we've seen them get better over time. So we're pretty confident in the quality of the experience. Of course once in a while you learn something new when it meets the real world and then it's an opportunity to improve that feature based on the insight. But given the rigour and the amount of testing that we do, we have a pretty good idea which things are going to be popular and how things are going to work. So I'm almost exclusively excited for people to try them out, for people to get these new phones. We know they're so durable, the battery life is 20% longer on the 9 than the 8. We have all these new AI features and the capability of running the latest and greatest on-device. Gemini Nano with multi modality opens up so many doors. So I'm excited for people to get them always a little bit, you know, trepidation to see what the first few users say because that can really set the tone. But I'm pretty optimistic that people are gonna like these.

Rachid 00:31:08 Alright then Brian, this might be the hardest question of them all because we always like to ask the guests of the Made by Google podcast their top tip for our listeners to try with a new device. Now you oversee quite some devices of course, so it might be hard to pick just the one feature. Maybe a tough question, but what is the top tip for our listeners once they get one of our new made by Google devices in their hands? What should they try out?

Brian 00:31:32 It is tough, but I'm gonna choose, Add Me because this is a feature. Mm-Hmm that has been so useful for me personally. Um, just over the summer, uh, we took a vacation and there was one day where my wife and I got some time to ourselves to go take a hike and of course you wanna commemorate that wonderful experience, but there's two of us and one camera and a selfie just doesn't do justice to the vistas of the place that we were hiking to. So we have this new feature called Add Me, which lets the photographer get in the shot too. So the way that it works is you first take one picture framed exactly the way you want it, you swap with someone else who was in the shot could work for two people or more. In our case it was the two of us. It gave the camera to her. AR helps you frame the shot 'cause it shows the previous picture so you can position it perfectly, takes the second shot and it creates a fusion of those two to get the perfect shot of everyone who's there, including the photographer. And that was just so useful. There's nobody else there to ask or you know, in some cases you just don't wanna bother someone to take your picture or maybe you have a pre-release device and you probably shouldn't give them your pre-release device. Yep.

Rachid 00:32:44 .

Brian 00:32:44 But it just gives you this amazing memory that is exactly how you remember it and you can frame it much better than you could if it's, if it's a selfie with a view in the background. So that one to me is quite life changing, especially as the designated photographer with the Glit and Greatest Pixel every year. Now I get to be in a lot of the pictures.

Rachid 00:33:04 Cast your mind back to October, 2016, the first made by Google event where we launched the very first Pixel device. Now let's say through some sort of glitch of the matrix, I was there to show you a Pixel 9 from 2024. What would you have said to Brian of 2016?

Brian 00:33:25 I know the Pixel 9 in the hand of 2016, Brian would've been pretty mind blowing. Just the level of capability and the, the leap that we're able to make in terms of the quality of the hardware, the durability of the hardware, the feature set, the fact that the phone and the assistant on the phone can answer phone calls for you is something that I wouldn't have dreamed of at that time. Probably there was a smart researcher who was already thinking about that at Google that, uh, I didn't know about. But when those features came to be, I mean the amount of time saving that you as a user can experience by assistant answering your calls, being able to have a live conversation with Gemini and go back and forth as if you're talking to a friend about a topic that they're expert in. These kind of capabilities were the beginnings. We had the dream of some of these with the very first Google Assistant, but the capability was nowhere near where it is today, thanks to the new techniques of generative AI. I think it's, you know, it's, it's fun to think how far we've come and also to project forward and think how far we'll go in the next 10 years and where these capabilities will take us. There's so many things being developed and hopefully they'll all come through feature drops to the people who buy our devices this year.

Rachid 00:34:55 Yes, amen to that. That is wonderful. Brian, thank you so much for coming on to the Made by Google podcast. I hope you get some time to relax after all the announcements though, I think you're probably already head down for our next products and can't wait to see what's coming next. Thank you so much.

Brian 00:35:10 Thank you, Rashid.

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