The Week of I/O

In 2012, I remember watching anxiously as Sergey Brin parachuted into the Moscone Center wearing a squirrel suit and Google Glass, talking about how holding a cell phone was emasculating. We had watched spellbound hoping that what was about to be revealed wasn’t going to be a competitor with the Ubi Project we were working on.

Instead, Google came out with a weird device, the Nexus Q, a squid looking device that had the ability to play songs via NFC requests. Clearly no one at Google knows how parties were thrown as they went through the improbable act of different people adding songs to a play list from their Android device at a party.

Fast forward five years and the Home has been out for more than a half a year and will likely get to over 1,000,000 sold in its first year. With this year’s I/O, if I had to pick a wishlist of what I’d want to see come out of the event this week it would be:

- More Google-branded hardware with Assistant built in
- A super easy to use embedded SDK
- A Google Assistant API (!) … not an SDK
- The ability to access Assistant with a wake word of any choosing (a pipe dream)
- Calling through the Home
- Voice messaging or other services through the Home product
- The ability for Google to play nicely with other voice services
- More openness with the developer community for Actions and Assistant

Some of these will never happen. Others might be far in the future. Maybe some are close by?