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Comment by awesomepantsm | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the advice: Don't write articles that can be answered with a single word "no".

Unlike startups, it's not like Google's business depends on investors supporting lofty goals. There would seem to be no benefit to faking a demo like this.

Not revealing the business location is likely just because they consider their business partners to be business data that they don't want to give away to competitors. Clean auto could easily just be done via a simple noise filter, just for the sake of the demo. When you have a little noise in your ear, it's not bad. But when you need to broadcast sound to an entire stadium, you need to rebalance it. This story is a load of nonsense.

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How do we know the answer is no? Maybe Google’s software can do what they say but they didn’t demo that.

Thay supposedly made a call (won’t release proof) to a restaurant (that they won’t name) and talked to a receptionist (who didn’t mention the restaurant name) that didn’t ask what time the reservation was for. And you couldn’t hear the restaurant in the background.

The demo is really suspicious. They deserve to be called on it. For all we know that was a recording of a fake training/test call with a Google employee.

If they manipulated the audio in some way (cut out an intro, filtered out noise, etc) they just have to say so.

Google deserves this kind of scrutiny. They’re a MASSIVE company, they should be able to handle these kind of questions about new products.

Especially those that are supposed to be released in the next few months.

A smoother fake would have bleeped over the supposed restaurant name. Something to look forward to next time!

Demo faking happens quite a lot even when company is not seeking external investment. I won't name the name but one of the high profile demos by a was actually borderline fake. The CEO insisted for his desired demo and was promised by his senior team months in advance. The whole keynote was structured around this demo. As usual, project was behind the schedule and hopeless. Ultimately the decision was to semi-fake the things while walking the fine line.

> Unlike startups, it's not like Google's business depends on investors supporting lofty goals. There would seem to be no benefit to faking a demo like this.

If they don't need to impress anybody, why would they even have a demo at all?

> Unlike startups, it's not like Google's business depends on investors supporting lofty goals. There would seem to be no benefit to faking a demo like this.

You could say the exact same thing about Microsoft and the Milo demo.

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