> Google sells its own phones which could be configured to have a conversation UI by default (or with Google’s Pixel Buds). This removes the friction of opening an app and setting a mode. Google also has a fleet of home devices already designed for voice interaction. Google has massive amounts of infrastructure all over the globe, with the lowest latency and fastest response. This undergirds search today, but it could undergird a new generative AI assistant tomorrow. Google has access to gobs of data specifically tied to human vocal communication, thanks to YouTube in particular. In short, the Gemini demo may have been faked, but Google is by far the company best positioned to make it real.

How does he square any of that with the rest of the preceding article? Google having a technical advantage on paper and still fumbling the ball is their M.O. for a decade. Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products.

Google is by far the best company positioned for AI assistants? Is this guy forgetting about Apple, the company that has a much stronger hardware ecosystem and that will demonstrate this in the coming months with a huge hardware launch that only they could do, leveraging a huge base of iOS apps, AirPod users, etc. Apple is building a network of personal hardware devices with a weak but well-integrated personal assistant. In 1-2 years, Siri will get a massive improvement based on recent advances in LLMs and it will be 80% as good as Google’s then probably thrice rebranded AI, but it will be 300% more polished and install automatically on hardware people actually like to use.