The first Google Home devices debuted on U.S. store shelves in October 2016. The Google Home Mini and Max joined the lineup the following year. Now, thanks to the power of the Google Assistant Compatible Device Program, you can search and ask questions to a wide assortment of products from a growing number of hardware manufacturers.
J.J. caught up with Kiran Kaja, Technical Program Manager for Search and Assistant, to get the latest on recent features added to the Google Home and Google Assistant platforms. New voices, continuous conversation and the connected home with Chromecast are just some of the subjects covered in this interview. With support for 80 countries, in 30 different languages, tune in to discover an example of what you can do with the Google Home and Google Assistant.
Check out the Google Accessibility blog to learn more about what changes are happening at Google.
Follow Google Access on Twitter
Or, visit the Google Access site
] to find helpful information and resources about various Google products.
Our 2018 summer convention coverage is sponsored by Google.
This week we're teaming up with our friends on the Google Accessibility team to talk about accessibility features within products like Android, Chrome OS, G Suite, Google Home, Assistant and more! Be sure to listen to our podcast series where we get the inside scoop, including the upcoming launch of Chat support and a 24 hour response time for the Disability Support team on July 9th.
The Google Accessibility team is also inviting everyone to participate in user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features -- and get rewarded for it. Select here to sign up to participate and learn more at google.com/accessibility.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
This convention special podcast is sponsored by Google.
Our friends at Google are working hard to create great technology products for everyone. They’re inviting you to participate in Google user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features and get rewarded for it. Check out our tweet for the sign-up link, at blind bargains, or head to google.com slash user research.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Convention coverage 2018 continues with more coverage from Google. We’re pleased to have Kiran Kaja here. He’s an accessibility program manager for Search and Assistant, which, of course, includes the Google Home. This is sponsored content from Google. We really appreciate Google sponsoring the convention coverage this summer, and thank you so much, Kiran, for coming on the podcast.
KIRAN KAJA: Thank you. Nice to be here.
JM: So as I mentioned, you do a lot with, especially Google Assistant and Google Home. Why don’t we talk a little bit – again, we’ll start at the beginning, and what is Google Home versus Assistant, and we’ll kind of get into some of the features.
KK: Okay. So Google Assistant is the smart digital assistant that is developed by Google. So it uses a conversational interface to help you find information, get things done for you, and basically help you when you’re trying to use technology to do things. So Google Assistant is the brains behind Google Home, which is a smart speaker. Google Home is the hardware that runs the Google Assistant.
JM: It is one piece of hardware. There’s actually quite a few. You were telling me 500 million devices that are running Assistant.
KK: That’s correct. So the Assistant’s actually available on plenty of other speakers and also other devices. So for example, there are third-party speakers from other manufacturers like Sony, Panasonic, Insignia, JBL, Harman Kardon, and a bunch of other things – other companies. The Assistant is available and is integrated into Android, and their Assistant is also available as an app on iOS phones. There is also Assistant on Android TV, the LG webOS smart TV, as well as the headphones from Bose, the Pixel Buds from Google, and a bunch of other headphones that have been announced.
JM: I think there was a -- was it an LG phone that you were telling me that even has a specific button?
KK: Correct. That’s the LG G7 ThinQ -- mouthful, a bit – that actually has a dedicated hardware button for the Assistant. The Pixel 2, which is the latest one from Google, that actually has something called Active Edge, which means as you hold the phone in your palm, you actually squeeze the bottom of the phone to activate the Assistant as well. So there are multiple ways to get to the Assistant. The idea is that you have the Assistant no matter what you’re doing and which platform, slash, device you’re using. It’s also available on the Chromebooks, the Pixelbook from Google, and we also recently announced the availability of some smart displays that run the Google Assistant.
JM: Very cool. Now, of course, the Assistant does lots and lots of things, and we won’t have time to talk about every single one. You’ll figure out millions and millions of commands. But why don’t you just highlight a couple of your favorites.
KK: So the Assistant can actually do more than one million actions. So these are things that you could ask the Assistant to do. There are multiple ways of actually figuring out what the Assistant can do for you, but the best way is to ask Google Home what can you do, and it’ll give you a list of options. There’s also, in the Google Assistant app, on the top right corner, there’s an explore button, which opens up the explore app, and there’s a lot of information there. The things that I really like the Assistant, or the Google Home, is to ask all sorts of random questions. I find that because the Google Assistant uses the search back, it’s really good at figuring out – or at least trying to figure out answers for most questions you have. So that’s one of my favorite pastimes. The media play back is something that I really always use, especially always to listen to podcasts.
JM: Yeah. And that just got enhanced with the Google Podcast app. You can kind of hand it off between an Android phone and the Assistant now.
KK: Correct. So there’s an Android app for Google podcasts, and you can start the podcast on Android app and then listen to it when you’re home on the smart speaker. And you can do that with audio books that you purchase from Google Play Books as well.
The other thing that I also use my Assistant, slash, Home for is to control some of the smart devices that I have. I love being able to set the temperature in my home with the Nest Thermostat.
JM: Uh-huh.
KK: And I also have this thing called Nest Hello Doorbell, a video doorbell. You actually can assign names to faces that it recognizes, and it – when there’s somebody at the door, it’ll automatically say Chris is at the door, and it announces it on your Google Home.
JM: That’s a really interesting way to gain access to smart devices, some of which have better accessibility than others, but you can control them with a consistent interface off the Google Home.
KK: Correct. So the primary advantage with something like the Google Assistant, slash, Google Home, is the conversational nature of the interface. So you can do things without actually having to open up an app. Let’s take a simple thing of actually being able to read an incoming message. Without something like the Google Assistant on your phone, you would actually have to unlock the phone, use your screen reader to go to the – open up the messaging app and tap –
JM: Uh-huh.
KK: -- and do a bunch of gestures, whereas you can just ask your Assistant to read my latest message or read my unread messages. And the same goes for smart home control. So you take out all the complexity involved in working with third-party apps that you have on your phone, which may or may not be accessible with a screen reader. So I think the real promise with the Google Assistant is the conversational interface and taking the complexity away of having to interact with systems that might be inaccessible.
JM: Well, speaking of the conversational aspect -- and we just did a tip on this on our last weekly podcast, the new continued conversation mode is a recent addition. And then, of course, if you enabled certain accessibility features, that becomes even more useful.
KK: Correct. So the continuous conversation is a feature that rolled out recently. So instead of saying the hot word every time you want to have a continuous conversation, say for example, you wanted to ask what the population of California is, but you’re also curious, after it answers, about Texas. So you can actually then go and just say, what’s the population of Texas without having to say the hot word again to trigger the Assistant. And there is a feature in Google Home which you can turn on to have it beep when it recognizes the hot word. So when you set up, this is one of the first things that really, we advise people to do, is to go into the Google Home app in the devices, find the device that you’ve just set up, and under more options, there is settings, and under settings, there is accessibility options. There is a start sound and the end sound. Those are the two options. Stop sound actually plays a beep when it recognizes the hot word, and the end sound plays when it detects that you finished with your question. When you have these enabled, the continuous conversation feature also works nicely because once – after it responds, it actually beeps to indicate that it’s still listening to you. So that’s a feature that is quite useful and handy. It’s also kind of making it more conversational and natural.
Talking about natural conversation, there’s also a new feature that we just rolled out. It’s called Multiple Queries, so you can have – instead of asking two separate questions for you to know the population of California and Texas, you can just say, what is the population of California and Texas? And it’ll give you two separate answers.
JM: And I suppose we should mention too – you mentioned the regular Google Home, but there’s now three – at least three now: Regular Google Home, then the mini, and the max.
KK: Correct. So the Google Home was the first one we launched back in, I believe October of 2016. And then last year, we actually have launched two more new devices. The Google Home Mini, which is the small donut-shaped speaker, which is actually surprisingly loud for its size, and also the Google Home Max, which is the high-end premium sounding speaker with sound IQ technology. So you can place that Home Max speaker anywhere in the room, and it understands the acoustics and adjusts the sound accordingly. But the Home, the Google Home is still there. So there’s the Mini, which is the smaller; the Home, which is the mid-sized; and the Max, which is the larger.
JM: And a quick plug for the Chromecast feature on all of these as well, which I think sometimes flies under the radar, especially if you’re not used to using Android, but you could do this from iOS as well, being able to send audio from your phone or other devices over to the Home, that’s very useful. And it helps separate speech audio from music and other things.
KK: That’s correct. So you can actually cast audio, send audio, to the Home speakers from pretty much -- including chrome browser on the computer. So let’s just say you found – you were – somebody sent you a playlist to a – a YouTube playlist link and you clicked on it and you liked the music and it started playing on your computer. You can actually Chromecast that as well.
Talking about cast, there’s another feature that listeners might be interested in. We call it the Verbose mode. So in addition to actually having -- or being able to cast audio to the speaker, you can actually ask Google Home to play something on a Chromecast-connected or Chromecast-enabled TV. So for example, you could say, watch cat videos on living room TV or watch cat videos on my TV. The normal response is to say, here are a few. Which one do you like to play? But if you have the Verbose Mode on, which you can turn on by saying, turn on verbose mode, it’ll actually read out the list of videos which are being displayed on the screen instead of just expecting you to look at it.
So these are small things that we are trying to do to actually make the experience really good for users with vision impairments. As it is, because it’s a voice-based technology, the Google Assistant and the Google Home are already pretty usable and accessible to visually impaired people, but whenever we have things like these, where we identify a gap, we actually are making sure that the experience is actually on par with sighted users.
JM: And speaking of voice, we should mention, before we move away from this, there are several new voices that you can get.
KK: You can get – we’ve announced six new voices for English. That makes – that brings the number of voices available for the Assistant to eight. And these are natural, human-sounding voices based on WaveNet technology from one of – from DeepMind, which is one of Google’s departments. And this kind of technology lets us develop voices, natural-sounding voices with intonation and pauses without – and really, really fast. So we also actually announced that there will be a John Legend voice.
JM: Yes.
KK: So there are quite a few interesting developments in the speech technology that – the other thing that –
JM: It’s really good that you have more than just ordinary people as voices. That’s –
KK: Yes.
We have also announced that there – Assistant’s going to be available in over 80 countries by the end of the year and in 30 languages. So if you have multilingual listeners, that’s something that you may want to keep an eye on.
JM: Great. Before we go, you’re here at the conventions. What else are you talking about and demoing?
KK: Oh, yes. So I’m doing a presentation, primarily on Google Home and the Google Assistant. But I also was going to talk about a couple of features that we are working on in the search and the news world as well. So on google.com, if you search for something and you’re in the search results page, we already had some headings to make it easier for screen reader users to navigate the page. But our studies indicated that screen reader users actually really like using headings for navigation, so we thought, we’ll actually improve the heading structure on the search results page so that the results are grouped together and you also are able to discover features that are there on the search results page with headings that you were – you wouldn’t be able to discover before or skipped over.
JM: Uh-huh.
KK: So for example, if you asked a question, what’s the population of California again, the answer’s actually right there on the page, on the search results page, but you don’t have to go into another website to find it. Those things will be surfaced with this new heading structure, which we’ll be rolling out in the next couple of weeks to most users in English to begin with.
On news.google.com, we have added, again, heading structure there as well. So you have level 2 headings for categories, level 3 for headlines, and level 4 for related headings. So it, again, news.google.com is hopefully much easier to navigate.
JM: Great. Again, thank you so much for coming on. If people want to send feedback your way or have comments on Google Home and the other things you’re working on, what’s the best way to do that?
KK: So multiple – there’s a couple of ways, I think. One is you could send an email to our Disability Support desk. The email address is disability-support@google.com. You can send questions or if you need help with something, you can email them. You can also send feedback by that email address.
There’s also a feedback form on google.com/accessibility, and you can also follow @GoogleAccess, that’s all one word, @ Google access. And you can tweet us. So there’s a few ways for you to send us feedback. And we love to hear from our users if you have questions, comments, suggestions, thoughts, please, please do send those our way.
JM: Great. Thank you so much for coming on, Kiran, and thanks again to Google for sponsoring this series of convention interviews and telling us about some of the Google services. We really appreciate it.
KK: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
JM: And be sure to check our podcast feed for more from Google and from the rest of the convention in 2018.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
