0:00 I took this job because I believe in this we're taking Gemini and bringing it to various parts of of of Google home it lets you sort of get to what you care about most as fast as possible hey guys Thunder e here and welcome to another interview segment we have and we're on a roll here with Google and I have anishia with me who is the head of Google home and Nest products um and they announcing pretty new and cool stuff here today so I want to start off with the very first one the Google TV streamer otherwise formerly known as a chomecast one why the name change I think with the name it reflects where we are right now at this moment Google TV has built uh phenomenal UI and capabilities we're building Google TV streamer to be the streaming
0:46 device of the Next Generation uh when we built the original chomecast it was really solving for where we were you know 10 12 years ago where you know users who wanted to stream content on their TV couldn't uh if they wanted to stream content from their phone to their TV they couldn't so the chomecast was really a device to enable that to happen you know a decade later uh what people are looking for in a streaming device is quite different they're looking for a device that can help them sort through the Myriad of content that they already have as well as you know the the sort of proliferation of smart devices in their homes and so the Google TV streamer is going to help you do that it's going to help you sort of sort through that content and be this hub for the home nice um so designs change obvious see we have two different colors one in porcelain one in Hazel now can you work
1:34 us a little bit about the design changes cuz this is more than just a streamer it's also a uh a hub as well so why the change from being something you can plug just at the back of the TV to something is bit more aesthetic in you know fitting to the home yeah uh you know I think we we were trying to be very intentional about the design so in designing s of the new Google TV streamer we wanted to build something that fit and Blended in really really well alongside your t TV instead of your media console uh so that it could sit there out in the open uh and a big part of that was also you know we've we've added in a whole bunch of new connectivity into these devices so the devices now have you know ethernet port USBC HDMI 2.1 uh it's also got a built-in thread radio now a big part of
2:19 that is you wanted to be able to have all of that connectivity but where the cables could actually just fall off the back uh and then with with things like radios you want those radios in this device but not stick the device into a cupboard for example which would interrupt the Wi-Fi interrupt the thread and so we you know we think where we landed with this sort of beautiful new uh form factor and design sort of you know beautifully sort of manages all of those considerations now the remotes have been uh upgraded yep larger I I like the larger size but there's also a new button what's that new button about and how do you guys see people using the new new button on there yeah you you know we we took a lot of what people loved about the original uh you know uh
3:04 remote uh we made it longer a lot more ergonomic so it's not just longer and and taller uh but the back is sort of made of a rubber finish so it's less slippery it sort of fits in in hands of all sizes really really well we did things like you know make it more ergonomic by moving the volume buttons over to the front uh and then like you mentioned you know we did add this uh customizable button and I think the power of the customizable button is uh it lets you sort of get to what you care about most as fast as possible uh so on the Google TV streamer that customizable button with a single click can get you to your smart home dashboard the Google home panel yeah uh so you can see what's going on in the home it can get you to your favorite app or it can help you you know uh you know change various like settings on the actual TV itself but that's up to you uh and so everyone can
3:50 sort of have their own variation of what it can do and now you have a button at the back of the Google TV streamer yeah that's my new favorite button it's it's mine too yes my family's too I should say not just me why haven't you done it sooner is the question fair enough uh listen I I I won't speak to the to the timing I would just say that myself personally but you know we hear this from all of our users uh you know losing your remote is a pretty common thing uh in a in a household of five I can never find my remote the kids have always put it somewhere and so the button that you're talking about is the is the new find my my find my remote Buton and you can actually find your remote in a couple different ways so you can press the phal button you can also say Hey Google help me find my remote uh
4:37 and it will do that as well or you can open the Google home app and and and click a button in there to to find it as well and the the remote will will beep okay yeah now this device is packed with a lot of current and Forward Thinking TV entertainment Tech we've got HDMI 2.1 ethernet port Wi-Fi uh supports Doby Vision do me Atmos in terms of updates and future support how are you guys planning to do you have a commitment is it something that you're thinking okay we'll do I'm not trying to compare it to like the Android updates like a 5 year 10 year what's the process there for users as if someone's looking to buy it how long do they expect to at least keep using this with updates coming to the system yeah it when you know when we designed this device I mentioned earlier
5:23 the original chomecast was sort of built for that that last decade of of TV uh we were very sort of intentional about building the Google TV streamer for for the sort of next decade of of streaming and a big part of that is sort of stacking with the right set of Technologies to to do that right uh so you talked about you know 4K HDR Dolby Atmos Vision things like spatial audio and things like that uh so we we've put in all those capabilities so that on the software and the content side we can enable them for various uh partner apps and content and so our teams are are working with with Partners to do that okay so no no mandate on what how long you would support it but you're just going to continue with your partners on a yearly basis okay you talked about thread matter Hub all built
6:09 into that kind of leads me to your second device which is the I guess you call it the fourth gen uh Google Lear thermostat it's lovely looks great um design why did you guys go with this new aesthetic look um I I know why personally it looks it would look great in my house but for you guys what was the idea for the design philosophy here yeah um yeah you know I would just say for the for the audience here if I were to help you rewind 12 years uh ago when we built the first Nest learning thermostat uh you know thermostats at that time where these sort of beige ugly boxes that sat on the wall yeah and The Nest learning thermostat sort of came in and and sort of changed what you could
6:55 expect of a device in the home right uh and that's our Heritage that's our sort of like Legacy if you will U it's been a while like the you know it's been nearly a decade we've learned a lot in the last of you know nine or so years and so we brought a lot of what users have loved what people have loved what uh about that original like that third gen learning f that and brought that to the new generation when we were designing it and we evaluated hundreds of of sort of options when designing it and some of the things that people love about or what we wanted to bring to this new one was some of the things that people loved about the old one right so what people loved was they loved the the elevated design that made it sort of look really really premium they loved sort of the the tactile sort of feedback of like a a
7:41 dial that you can physically turn U they love sort of being able to like glance at the thermostat and be able to see visually you know what's happening at any given moment uh and so we brought all of that and we thought we could do even better uh and so that's what you see with the with the new design uh for The Nest learning thermost we think it's going to be the most beautiful uh thermostat on the market and certainly we hope that'll be something that you put on your wall now with the the new thermostat there's also a bunch of new features coming in um one of them that you guys uh brought up was of course integration with Gemini and uh some of the Gemini automations can you explain how users would use that on a daily basis and what it brings to them because right now setting up automations can be
8:26 tedious y uh if you're a pro User it's easy if you're a regular person you would just skip it yeah so how you how are you helping people you know enforce that or do that yeah uh you know I we're at a really like fascinating Point uh like as an industry in terms of AI like the The Nest learning thermostat has used AI for for a long time now and and we use sort of AI models to optimize you know how we make you feel comfortable and how we save you money and things like that um and and we're sort of supercharging that so all of these sort of like algorithms that go into it we're making them smarter uh so you save more money and things are more efficient uh similarly on the streamer which we just talked about we're using AI to to do a lot of really cool things like you know build beautiful customizable wallpapers
9:13 for example when your TV is sitting idle uh but if I were to sort of take a step back and look across the entire Google home ecosystem um you know we we've always at sort of nest and Google home had this Vision to build a home that is helpful uh to people uh we' we've always talked about building The Helpful home uh and in some ways you know we've been sort of limited by the technology of the day and we think that Gemini and where we are today with large language models is a is sort of a major inflection point in the kinds of things we can unlock for the home right so that's that's sort of just a a little bit of a teup so today what you know what we're excited to share is that we're taking Gemini and bringing it to various parts of of of Google home so one of the things that you mentioned was how we're making home
9:58 automation uh easier and more accessible so today smart home automation is still very much a you know it's it's it's something that a lot of power users uh you know use very very deeply uh and what we've heard from users time and time again is that they want the value and the benefits of home automation without the sort of the sort of complexity of setting it up uh and so uh that's why we thought home automation is a great way to say like hey let's bring Gemini where you can sort of like use your natural language to say what you want yeah and then on the back end we'll figure out how to translate that into the the various steps to get to that so specifically what that means is if you all you care about is making yourself feel comfortable you should not we think
10:43 have to be able to be say oh when I'm home turn the temperature to 26 Dees but only do that if I'm home and my partner isn't if my partner is also there make sure that it's you know 71 instead of 69 uh now we can do all of that just by saying you know make me feel comfortable when both me and my partner are there and then we'll create the automation for you and we give you control so you can always tweak it as well and so I think that's those are the kinds of things where we think AI can be an enabler to make things more easy and accessible for people um and then we give you control over the outcomes what other um aspects are you using Ai and Gemini to to improve the experience with Nest yeah the the other sort of like there's a couple other big ones and uh you know
11:30 one of the big ones I would say is that you know we've been looking to bring Gemini to uh and and sort of the multimodal models to our cameras so Nest cameras have historically you know had a whole variety of intelligence features built into it so you know you could detect motion and packages and people we'd always you know we went a step further you know people detection was able to get to the uh face level so we had a feature called familiar faces where you can detect individuals uh coming and going from your homes uh but all of that can get supercharged with Gemini so with with multimodal models uh what these models can do is they can both they can use text they can use Vision they can use audio you use all of that to sort of start to figure out what your camera is seeing and make that more useful for you so if you got a camera
12:15 today I think we we were chatting about this earlier all of us with cameras can empathize with the fact that we get hundreds of notifications and that's not a nest camera thing that's like any any camera uh thing right like you got a 100 motion detection but I think what we know once we have cameras is not all motion is created equal not all people is created equal like a leaf falling is not the same as a truck driving by that you probably care about knowing uh and so you know bringing Gemini to cameras means we'll be able to make our cameras significantly smarter uh and so we're starting that with some some specific features uh so you'll be able to search your camera history now uh but not for specific things you can search generally which is we think very very powerful uh the descriptions for what your events have are getting significantly richer so
13:00 these models are actually generating descriptions for what it's seeing uh so that's going to be really really powerful you'll be able to do that in the Google home app uh so yeah so you know number two after home automation is that the cameras are going to get a step function increase in in uh in its intelligence the third one is is the Google Assistant uh We've for some time had this Vision that uh the Google Assistant could play this this role bu building out and delivering this proactive helpful experience in the home right across your speakers your displays your TVs um and and part of that is like the home itself has a very unique set of context the home is not quite like your phone your phone is a very personal device it's about you your home devices are about all of the people in your home it's about understanding me my partner
13:47 my kids all of that and understanding how all of that works together so when you're building an assistant for the home you have to solve for that that multi-user sort of scenario this the communal nature of it um and and the vision remains exactly the same right like we still want to build that uh you know I think in general not just us but across the industry again limitation of Technology but I think where we are today you know sets us up on a much better path to actually achieve that original vision of building a great assistive experience in the home and so uh what we're sharing is that later this year we're already we're already going to be bringing Gemini models to actually improve that Google Assistant experience on speakers and displays and and and TVs so uh you know we're looking to make it you know a lot uh make the responses that
14:34 you hear from uh from Google Assistant a lot more natural so we're bringing a lot more like a number of new voices that will just seem a lot more natural and and Converse the way that you know we as humans uh Converse uh we're also looking to make it uh a lot more capable as well so excited about that cool so before we wrap up yeah rapid fire questions let's go all right um favorite streaming service favorite streaming service um kind of depends on the content I'm watching right now um Apple TV plus and YouTube TV for the Olympics okay um first streaming device chomecast chomecast okay yeah OG chomecast OG
15:20 chomecast all right um favorite smart home product favorite smart home product um I have three kids it's my Nest cam okay enough set um I was going to say favorite Auto home automation but it might have to do with observing the kids we can do a whole we can do a whole episode on just that how about that um uh final question is what would be your ideal smart home product my ideal smart home product interesting it's a huge category one of things yeah I don't I know this is going to be
16:06 a slight slight non-answer for me it's not a single product okay uh for me the like and and by the way this is I I took this job because I believe in this and I I believed in this before I I I stepped into this role but uh the smart home for me has always been about like how do I get all the things in my home to work together yeah we're still not there like not everything works as seamlessly as it should um and so for me the the the silver bullet or my my Holy Grail smart home product is when all of the devices in my home are working well together where things are actually getting better and smarter and stuff like that uh so maybe it's a it's a single app or assistant that brings all of it like
16:51 really really really well together all right so hope hopefully Gemini can yeah yeah I think the you know the Gemini infused version of of like as we as we take Google Assistant to make it smarter I think the combination of Google assistant and the home app could could play that role okay cool well thank you very much hey absolute pleasure yes and if you guys enjoy that and you have any questions for Anish or the Google nest and Google home team let us know and we'll try and pass them on to him otherwise don't forget to like share subscribe leave your thoughts on the different products and always enjoy your entertainment hey hit that like button
