The Device-free future

SitePoint

For a few years we’ve asked ourselves this question: now that computers, mobiles and other computerized screens have overcome just about all of the limitations that previously frustrated us, what’s next? As Vauhini Vara writes in the New Yorker, we’re looking at the start of a post-device future. Computer technology is powerful and flexible enough that we can start to expand it beyond the basic screen-and-input paradigm, integrating it seamlessly into our environment.

New Yorker

“Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the ‘device’ to fade away.” His point was that, because computing technology is becoming smaller and more powerful, computers can be built in all kinds of forms. Building devices is no longer hard. The difficult part—and the part that will distinguish products from one another—is the experience that computers facilitate.

It might seem odd, then, that on Wednesday, Pichai got onstage to hype a new device. Google Home, which the company unveiled at its annual conference for developers, is a “voice-activated home product,” in Google’s parlance, which means you can command it to do things and it will respond. It’s a cute little thing—if Wall-E had an affair with a salt shaker, their love child might look a bit like this—but it appears to have some pretty powerful capabilities: music, making dinner reservations, texting friends, and more.