Transcript

Voiceover: I'll give you a good example of this. You don't need to teach a human that if there's a little child walking towards a swimming pool, that you should be concerned.

Rachid (01:57.525) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anish (02:00.95) Now, if you could take a camera and not have to teach it that that's important, and suddenly now your Nest Cams can say, hey, guess what? There's a child walking towards a swimming pool. You should probably be concerned about this. That is really, really powerful.

Rachid (00:09.042) Anish, tell me about the first time you saw the power of Gemini coming to life within Google Home. What happened and how did you respond to it?

Anish (00:25.358) Today we've been one of the leaders in things like camera intelligence, energy intelligence, essentially bringing intelligence into the home. And we've done a pretty good job at building these narrow models that are really good at doing specific things.

So our thermostats today do a phenomenal job. We've built these AI models over the last decade, really good at figuring out your patterns, predicting how to make you most comfortable and save you money.

Our cameras are pretty good at detecting people, at detecting animals, detecting packages. So over the last set of decade, we've got pretty good at building these models that do specific things really, really well.

Anish (01:13.517) There was a point last year where we asked ourselves, what if the camera could just understand everything it sees and then figure out what's the most important thing for me to know.

And that was the start of our journey on how we could bring Gemini to things like cameras and thermostats. And we can talk about this in more detail, but that to me was eye-opening. The idea that the camera could just figure out things without being told what it needed to figure out means it's an immensely powerful unlock.

Like I'll give you a good example of this. You don't need to teach a human that if there's a little child walking towards a swimming pool, that you should be concerned.

Rachid (01:57.525) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anish (02:00.95) Now, if you could take a camera and not have to teach it that that's important, and suddenly now your Nest Cams can say, hey, guess what? There's a child walking towards a swimming pool. You should probably be concerned about this. That is really, really powerful.

Now, we've seen that potential. We've seen the first steps in that direction, and that's what we were building towards. It was that moment where we started to see some of these pieces come together that just blew all of our collective minds. And that's why we're so incredibly bullish on Gemini and bringing Gemini to the home.

Rachid (02:35.786) So you're a senior director of product management for Google Home. It's your fourth year in the team. What keeps you excited to work on Google Home?

Anish (02:45.038) The fact that with Gemini we are now at this technological inflection point where we are better empowered than we ever have been over the last five, 10 years to realize our mission.

That to me is what keeps me super, super excited about this, which is the fact that our mission has not changed. Like from our early days, our mission has been, take care of the people in the home and the world around it. And we've had various technologies that we've leveraged to actually deliver that promise through a variety of different devices and software, but I think we are probably at the best moment in time to realize that vision and deliver that value to users.

Rachid (03:37.196) So it's the third time you're on the Made by Google podcast. I feel like every time you're on, you have something brand new to tell us. So that tells me that constant evolution is the name of the game in the Google Home team. Can you speak to that?

Anish (03:50.616) Change is definitely constant, right? And we like the idea of having momentum and one way that I think about this is we've been on this journey and this journey is about taking the many millions of users that we've accumulated over the last many years, doing right by them, ensuring that we transition them into this next generation of the home, but in parallel also in investing for the future. And so this year was a pretty transformational and foundational year for us.

We rolled back the curtain on our platform for the home earlier this year at Google I/O. So the goal there was really about how we can untether the smart home with home APIs that leverages Matter as a foundation. What we wanted to do was actually empower any and all developers to build these amazing experiences for the home into their own apps and services.

So not just the developers that think about the home, but any developer, whatever app you build, is there an opportunity for you to bridge the divide between the digital and the physical worlds. And we think the platform has the potential to do that.

So you can see things like, oh you know what? I as a developer, I build a food delivery app. Today that's an entirely digital experience, but with this platform-based approach, that food delivery app can now integrate with your physical world by saying, hey, you know that when a driver is approaching, ready to drop off your food, I can flash the lights on your doorbell so the driver knows which house it is. And similarly on the inside of the house, I could send you notification on your speaker to say, hey, guess what? Your food is about two minutes away. So even if you don't have your phone, suddenly that food delivery app is able to go beyond just a digital experience and blend that in with the physical. So we were really excited.

The platform really playing that foundational role. And then since then, we've had a lot of exciting stuff as well. So last month, we shared our latest hardware. Our new Google TV Streamer, the successor to the Chromecast and the Nest Learning Thermostat, the successor to the original Learning Thermostat.

Today, more recently, we've got a lot of really, really great AI intelligence and goodness to share, so we can talk about that as well. I'm pretty excited about where we're going.

Rachid (06:11.832) Yeah, this will be an intriguing episode because I feel we need to get into all of those topics.

Anish (06:12.735) Let's do it.

Rachid (06:13.832) And maybe we should start with the camera. So you mentioned integrating Gemini will help the cameras be much smarter. You gave one example that could perhaps help warn me when something might go wrong in my house. What are other examples where the addition of Gemini to our Nest cameras can be useful to me as a homeowner, for example.

Anish (06:52.334) The thing that we want to build towards is ensuring that your Nest Cam's are the smartest cameras that you could possibly buy.

And part of that is realizing this vision of the camera is just able to understand what it sees, interpret the things that it sees that are most important to you, and give you that right level of information when you need it most.

So that to us is the promise and what we're working towards. And that's gonna be a journey, but that journey is realizing value today, right? So later this year, we're gonna roll out some of the first sets of those features where you're gonna be able to see a step function change in what you can expect from your camera.

So before, if we detect motion or if we detect a particular person, we'll send you a notification every time we do that what we're going to be able to get to is being able to ask questions like, hey, did my kids leave their bikes on the driveway? I've got a party later today. I want to make sure my driveway is clear. So what's top of mind for me as a user is I want to know that my kids' bikes are not on the driveway because then people can't park. And so you couldn't do that in the past. You can now do things like that.

You could previously get alerts when packages were delivered. But say you've got a day where you're expecting multiple packages and you actually care more about the Fed Ex package than the UPS one that you know you're going to get.

Well, you can ask, was there a FedEx package delivered to me or not? And so that's where I mentioned earlier, this opportunity to move away from specific vertically trained models that can do one thing really well to this generalized intelligence and understanding is going to be a massive unlock. And I'm really, really excited to see the first steps of that coming to the Nest Cam later this year.

Rachid (08:58.863) Just let me make sure I understand this correctly. So you have an example of where the Nest Cam can send me more intelligent, more insightful notifications. But I can now also basically ask questions to my camera, right?

Anish (09:11.97) That's right. So what we're actually going to do is we're starting with the ability to search more naturally in the way that you as a human think. So you being able to ask the kinds of questions that I mentioned. And we're starting with descriptions as well.

And then you'll be able to search using your natural language any of those events. And then as we refine that, we think the obvious next step is being able to filter that into notifications and start to populate the notifications and the things that matter most.

Rachid (09:52.604) So there's even more Gemini in Google Home. And I'm now referring to the Help Me Create feature, which I think is great for people who ever tried to set up an automation but then maybe just didn't quite understand how to do it because it takes maybe a certain type of person to actually get it done. And it seems like you're going to make that way easier for most people. What is that feature and how did you come up with that?

Anish (10:32.876) Yeah, listen, I'm a home automation nerd and I wear that badge pretty proudly, but I also recognize that the vast majority of people aren't. So that's totally fair. Like that's the majority of my own household and my family as well.

With that being said, what our team has been doing is we've been working pretty tirelessly to make Google Home one of the most capable home automation platforms. So over the course of last year and this year, we've added a tremendous amount of capability. Think our platforms now support well over 100 different ways you can connect and control various smart home devices from tons of tons of different brands. You can do that in the Home app. You can do that via Script Editor. So in general, we've made it a lot more powerful.

Now, that power today is pretty niche for people like me. And so people who are fully bought into home automation already. In parallel, what we've seen is we've seen this incredible growth in smart home devices. Each device is getting smarter, but what's not happening quite as well is that you aren't getting that compounding smartness every time you add more devices, right? The promise is I have device number one and then I add a second device that's smart and together they are somehow smarter than each individual device. That's not quite there yet. Now home automation was the thing that's made to enable that, right? It's meant to make sure that all of these devices work together to either make your life easier or to make your life safer or to make it simpler..

Anish (12:11.118) Why is that not quite where we need it to be is that home automation is still pretty niche. Users want the benefit without the complexity of doing that work, right? I'm comfortable doing that work, but the vast majority of users aren't. So for us, this help me create a feature is really about democratizing that power and making it available to everyone, regardless of whether you're an automation nerd like me or not.

Rachid (12:37.246) So I have a confession to make, Anish. I think I am just like you, a home automation nerd. And I think everything in my house is connected. But then I'm like, what should I make? What kind of automation should I make now that is useful? Are there ways where Google Home can actually help me come up with these creative ideas to create that intelligence?

Anish (13:02.846) Absolutely. We obviously run tons of user research on this kind of stuff, And so the first point that I made was also very heavily anchored in our research, which is that users want the benefit without doing the work. So that's sort of one thing. I think the second thing is a really interesting one that you're bringing up, which is if you know what you want, it's easier to get started.

But if you don't know what you want, or you don't even know what's capable of, it's even harder to get started.

Rachid (13:34.984) That's me.

Anish (13:04.846) And that's where Help Me Create helps to solve both of those things, right? So you can come in and you can say, remind me, every time the kids come back, remind them to bring their bikes and put them into the garage. Or after the kids eat dinner, remind them to run the dishwasher. Great. So those are specific things. You know what you're asking for. And then Help Me Create is able to say, okay,

Anish (13:58.528) and my camera that's over my driveway sees the kids coming in, I'm going to generate a notification on the speaker to remind them to put the bikes in. Great. So you knew what you wanted. We were able to use language models in Gemini to create an automation. And if you don't know what you want and you've got 25 devices in your home, Help Me Create can also deliver suggestions and things like that of what is possible.

Rachid (14:34.089) Anish give me one second, there's a cat that needs to escape.

Anish (14:38.434) Hey, maybe you've got a home automation that can take care of that when I'm recording.

Rachid (14:45.375) I had no clue she was here.

Anish (14:47.862) When I'm recording close the door so the cat doesn't come in.

Rachid (14:54.515) That'd be amazing. I might need you to have the great ideas here. Amazing. Anish, sounds all great.

Rachid (15:15.52) Should we now talk about the thing that maybe started it all, which is the Google Assistant, right? That's one of the first things that help people talk to their home in a way, get help. I think there are still some pain points, challenges that users have when it comes to the smart home. And I'm wondering if Google Assistant is also helping tackling these challenges. How can we sort of evolve the Assistant, making sure that we provide an even better user experience for them in the smart home?

Anish (15:47.416) We've been on this journey for some time. For years, we've been pursuing this vision of an AI assistant for the home. But in many ways, we were limited by what the existing technology of the day could do. So Google Assistant in the home to date has helped millions of households get more things done. And we're continuing to invest in creating the best Google Assistant experience for everyone.

I mentioned it earlier, with Gemini technology, we're at this technological inflection point where we believe we're better able to realize that vision and supercharge what the Google Assistant can do in the home.

And kind of reimagine what your home assistant can do with just your voice. Part of that is, we're working to ensure that we make the assistant a more natural, more conversational experience so you don't have to precisely use the exact set of words to get the exact output. We think that's really important. Just talk the way you talk to a friend or your partner and the assistant is able to understand what you mean and get stuff done.

Rachid (17:36.992) I really can't wait to get my hands on that. I'm sure you're working flat out to get that out there.

Rachid (17:56.034) And then we, course, have, as you mentioned at the beginning, shiny new hardware. We have a new version of the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Google TV Streamer, the successor to Chromecast.

Maybe we can start with that one. What about the name?think Chromecast has been around so long, people recognize that name. It apparently felt like the right time to change that. What was the thought behind the new name?

Anish (19:13.09) We've launched seven generations of Chromecast and sold over 100 million of them worldwide since we first launched it in 2013. It's kind of surreal to think that it's been over a decade. And what's interesting is that as the technology has become more advanced and streaming has actually become increasingly popular, what we've found is that the core user need has actually changed from back in 2013.

Rachid (19:29.187) Yeah.

Anish (19:46.784) What we've seen is that the core problem that we were trying to solve, it actually evolved from, I need a simple way to stream content from my phone or my tablet or, or my laptop onto a big screen, right? Just, just rewind with me. Imagine back to 2013, smart TVs weren't a thing.

Rachid (20:05.65) Yep, that's right.

Anish (20:06.254) Most of these were not connected and streaming was also actually in its nascency. So right now today we take Netflix and other things and YouTube for granted. But it was like very much in its nascency and there was very much like a web and phone thing. And so really Chromecast was this device that unlocked the ability to stream to the big screen. Now you fast forward to 2024 and that's not quite the problem,

Virtually every TV that you buy, whatever price point, is a built-in smart TV and you can stream directly from the TV itself. So the user pain point that we found through research is that today in 2024, users actually want a couple of things. They want a more unified and personalized entertainment experience, and they want this great smart home experience.

And so that's why for us, this was the right moment to rethink what the device, was in and of itself. So it's not just the name change, but with the Google TV streamer, it's actually a few different changes. The form factor changed. It went from a dongle that you plugged into the back of the TV to a box, a beautiful one that sits under your TV on the mantle, and then the name change also associated with that. So it was actually a wholesale change. And that set of changes were very much anchored around the big shift in user changes from 2013 to now 11 years later in 2024.

Rachid (21:38.706) So you mentioned the design. Tell me more about that because I think there are many other streamers out there and they are some version of a rectangular box which the Google TV streamer is not. It looks distinctly different. Why does it look the way it looks and were there other considerations playing into that?

Anish (21:57.272) One of the most obvious and perhaps exciting things when you see the devices is obviously the design, right? It's probably a good starting point. We put a lot of thought into usability and sustainability when we were actually designing the streamer so what you'll see with the design is that in general, it's built to blend in beautifully with most homes. It's sleek and stylish, but understated at the same time.

What we did from the outset was we were trying to design it in a way that it could neatly tuck away between your TV and your media console. And part of that is that we wanted to make it easy to actually hide the wires in the back.

So with the Google TV Streamers, it's a number of different ports. You can hardwire ethernet, USB-C, and things like that. And so we wanted to make sure that the wires could drop off the back and hide behind. There's another big part of it, which is we wanted to add increased connectivity. So what you will see with the Google TV Streamer is we've put things in, I mentioned the ethernet port before for direct connection, but the other big one here is we've added in a thread radio. So the Google TV Streamer now acts as a smart home hub.

Now, a key consideration there is as you add these radios into the device to make it more powerful, the last thing you want to do is take it and stick it into a closet, which then detracts from that purpose to begin with. So those were a number of the different considerations was we were adding in more connectivity, we're adding in more power, there's more storage, there's more RAM, so the device footprint change, the design change, all optimizing for these various variables.

Rachid (23:41.765) So I guess people know what Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB is, but you also mentioned thread, which is maybe less common. What is it and why do I need it?

Anish (23:51.362) Yeah, know, Thread is a connectivity protocol. In some ways, can think of it as, we've got Wi-Fi, we've got Bluetooth. Think of Thread as another connectivity protocol. And what it does is it allows devices that have very low power to connect to each other or to a controller. So a good example here would be a light bulb. It's a low-powered device. Or a lock is a low-powered device.

Now, if you put a Wi-Fi chip in there, would suck a lot of power. So Thread is an alternate for that, where you can still have that device function really, really well. It can operate with low latency, but not consume a lot of power. I think for the most part, most users don't need to think about Thread too much. The idea is that it is the thing, it is one of backbones that will help all the smart home devices in your home work well together.

Rachid (24:47.145) Amazing. So it's also a little bit of future-proofing, I suppose. Well, that was just one of the two new devices that were announced back in August. The other one, of course, the brand new Nest Thermostat, which looks gorgeous. Why would we need a new Thermostat? What's new compared to the previous generation?

Anish (25:09.122) Yeah, you mentioned previous generation. It's been 12 years actually since the first Nest thermostat launched. And that was, in many ways, was a watershed moment.

Like the Nest Learning Thermostat in many ways kicked off the smart home trend and space that we have today. It took this relatively mundane box that sat on your wall and transformed it into this like intelligent device that was beautiful. And since then we rolled out three evolutions of it. So we had the original, then we had the V2 and V3, both of which were 10 and nine years respectively. So it's been a while. And even to this day, the Nest Learning Thermostat, the 3rd gen continues to be one of the leaders in the market. But...

Anish (26:08.726) A lot has changed since then at the same time. It set up this really great moment where we thought that the combination of a new industrial design plus a whole lot of incredible intelligence made this a really, really good time for us to refresh the Nest Learning Thermostat.

Rachid (26:00.109) We changed the whole outside of it. It has a new industrial design, as you mentioned, but surely we changed more than just the way it looks.

Anish (28:51.712) Absolutely. The way it looks is certainly one of the first things you'll notice about the device. When you see it, I'm obviously biased, but it is absolutely stunning. We designed it to look and feel like a piece of art that you put on the wall.

Isabelle, my partner in crime on the design side, talks about this as being jewelry for your walls, which I actually really love. But yes, you're right, it's not meant to be just

Rachid (29:17.578) Nice.

Anish (29:23.2 32) The beautiful thermostat you can buy. It's also meant to be the smartest thermostat you can buy.

And when I say smart, mean the kind of smarts that can both simultaneously help you feel comfortable and save money and energy at the same time. So packed into the Nest Learning Thermostat 4th Gen, we've rolled out a whole bunch of new AI and intelligence capabilities. So I'll give you a couple of examples.

We've got new features like natural heating and cooling. So for example, if it's a really sunny day and your home is naturally just going to heat up a few degrees on its own? Well guess what? The thermostat will figure that out and it'll pause heating to help you save money and you'll still get to the same temperature you had hoped to get to anyway. So that's a good example.

We have another feature called Adaptive Eco. And so if it's a cold winter day in Chicago, for example, Adaptive Eco may only adjust the temperature slightly, since it will take longer to warm up the house when you return. So Adaptive Eco is basically saying, hey, if I know you're going to leave the house, I'm going to turn the thermostat down so I save you energy. But I want to make sure that I can heat it back up when you return. Now, if it's really, really cold in that Chicago example I gave you, it's going to take a lot of energy to heat it back up. So it's actually not going to turn the thermostat down to begin with. So that's the kind of intelligence that we've built into the device that we're really excited about.

Rachid (30:51.212) That's amazing. There's one thing I'm always curious about when you're someone working so hard on a product and in this case more than one. So you work hard with the whole team, designers, engineers. There is a day where it goes out. Usually it is the press that gets the device first and they publish their reviews. I'm wondering what is that like? So you know when those reviews come out. Where are you?

Are you like reading all of them or are you more like having your eyes closed, like I'm just too nervous to read all of that. And what do you learn from those reviews? Is there anything you need to do once you read them?

Anish (31:32.684)

I read every comment on every forum from users on our products. I read all of it. I read every press article. And then I think the big part of it that's really, important is that we respond to that feedback. I think the thermostat was a really good one.

We launched the thermostat to a lot of really sort positive reactions from the market. And that's a big step because we were refreshing one of the most iconic products of the last decade. And in general, the vast majority of people loved it.

We did have a small segment of users that worried about the screen not being bright enough for them. We heard that feedback. And in a matter of weeks, we rolled out a software update that allows users who have a thermostat in a particular hallway or has light shining on it, the ability to more granularly control their brightness.

I give you that as one example of, any good product development should be build the product, it's informed by research. Once you get it out in the wild, there will be additional feedback and you've got to be able to listen to that feedback and iterate in real time as much as possible.

Rachid (33:35.821) Mm-hmm.

Rachid (33:51.086) One issue to control the home. We've been talking about you can speak to the home, of course, using Google Assistant, for example. I presume that's also a way to talk to my camera someday in the not too distant feature. But surely there are more touch points that you need to work on. One example is the Google Home app itself. How do you make sure that all these smart home experiences are accessible in a way that is useful to the user?

Anish (34:21.208) With the Google Home app, we set out to build a very deep smart home experience. we think of the Google Home app on your phone as the centralized hub that can do a lot of different things across a lot of different devices. But what you've hopefully seen in our strategy over the last couple of years is we want to meet users where they are. And what I mean by that is, if this is a classic example, if you're in the kitchen at the sink washing your dishes and somebody rings the doorbell, your hands are wet, well, meeting the user where they are means not having to put your dishes down.

Go wipe your hands, go find your phone to see who's there. So one example of us meeting users where they are is we just built the ability with the new recently launched Pixel Watch to be able to flick your wrist while you're doing your dishes and see who's exactly at the door and respond to them right there in that context. Similarly, we brought the Google Home panel to the Google TV Streamer. So in the evenings, say for example, you put the kids down and you're settling down, to watch a show, you can press with a single button, it'll bring the home panel out and you can check your cameras to make sure the kids are still in bed without having to pick your phone up again. So I think for us, the strategy is very much around the Google Home app will be this deep, like rich experience on your phones. And then we are working very hard to bring, relevant experiences to users and meet them where they are, whether it's on their watch or their tablet or in their car, on their TVs, and so on.

Hopefully you've seen some of that and we're going to continue to do more and more of that.

Rachid (36:11.79) And each every time we talk, I feel like we're living in the future, which I think must make it very interesting to be you because I imagine you must have a view of the actual future that we're working towards.

How do you, well, keep a vision of that future? How do you know where to go and what is next while everything you're already building feels so next to many people, perhaps?

Anish (36:38.018) Yeah, we definitely operate in these multi-year cycles, especially on the devices side. When you build physical devices, the lead times to develop those products tend to be in the number of years. So yeah, I have a pretty good view of what we're doing for the next couple of years.

But I think devices are one component of it. the part that I'm so excited about where multimodal language models and Gemini in particular are today, the potential that it has to unlock these devices and what those devices can do is just immense and it's incredible.

And so that's the future that we're working the teams on. It's like we know that Gemini will be this inflection point for the smart home. And we can see what we're trying to build towards. And then our job as a product team is to ensure that while we're working towards that future that's three years out that we're delivering value to users on an ongoing basis. And that example with the cameras is a great example because we see this future a couple years out where the camera just understands everything, it figures it out, it knows what matters to you and gets you the right information. That's a little bit further out, but we're going to realize value immediately when we launch things like these AI descriptions and the ability to search your camera and stuff like that right here in the next few months.

Rachid (38:11.142) We'll always ask our guests a top tip for the road, something that the listeners of the Made by Google podcast could do with one of the products that we talked about today. Maybe, Anish, in this case, we can change it into what is a kick-ass automation that you perhaps created in your own home or you've heard of, maybe someone on the team has, that you feel like, you know what, people at home who are into the smart home should probably try and set that up, for example, with a new Help Me Create feature.

Anish (38:41.624) Great question. I've got a reasonably basic one that's probably our most used one that we love, which is our TV time automation. So when my wife and I settle down for the evening, we put the kids in bed, our TV time automation, which we can now actually initiate right from our Google TV Streamer, essentially turns out all the lights, it turns the thermostat down, it closes our blinds, and then it pops up our camera view so we can take a quick look at the kids before we start to watch TV. So that's a good one. I think that's, something that most people hopefully can find some value out of. One other one is I have a setup here in my office where when I join a video conference, a light outside my office goes off and it turns red. So when I'm working from home, the kids know I'm on a meeting. Don't barge in. And that one's both an awesome one and a practical one at the same time.

Rachid (39:48.37) You have like your own on-air light outside of your studio there.

Anish (39:53.374) Exactly. So maybe in a different life, I wanted to be a podcaster or a rock star in a studio. And so maybe that's why I built that out. But if you haven't tried it, I definitely recommend you do something like that with your setup.

Rachid (40:06.514) Think I'm going to try and do that right now. Anish, thank you so much for coming on the Made by Google podcast, and we hope to have you again in the future.

Anish (40:13.154) Hey, this is always a great time, Rashid. I'll be back anytime. Cheers. Thanks.

Rachid (40:16.084) Thanks a lot.