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Google storms into Internet of Things with Brillo and Now on Tap

Marco della Cava
USA TODAY
Aparna Chennapragada, director at Google Now, speaks during the Google I/O 2015 keynote presentation in San Francisco, Thursday, May 28, 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet of Things and intuitive contextual machine learning are squarely in Google's massive sights, the search company made clear at its two-day I/O developers conference Thursday.

Dubbed Brillo, Google's new IoT operating system is aimed at developers of smart products. Brillo launches in the third quarter, while its corresponding IoT language – called Weave – is slated for Q4.

"Imagine a farmer managing an entire farm from a smartphone," Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of products, told the assembled developers at the Moscone Center here. "But right now, for users it can still be confusing to make all this work together."

That synchronicity is vital if Internet of Things products are to boom like many expect. By 2020, there will be 25 billion connected devices at home and at work, according to Gartner.

Pichai took the opportunity to plug the company's acquisition last year of Nest, which makes smart thermostats and smoke detectors. In recent months, Nest has been adding to its product line through acquisitions such as DropCam.

Pichai described Brillo as "the lower layers of Android, the core essentials," and critical to Google's IoT efforts in the coming years.

Another revelation of I/O – which stands for the tech term, input/output – was Now on Tap, a significant improvement to Google Now, which makes a smartphones reactive more intuitively by, say, giving you traffic information when you get a driving route.

"We want to proactively bring you answers," said Aparna Chennapragada, Google Now's product director, before launching into a few demos.

WHAT'S SKRILLEX'S REAL NAME?

The first involved a DJ who was playing Skrillex on stage. When the DJ asked his smartphone, "What's his real name," it answered correctly, "Sonny John Moore." The point being, Now on Tap understood that "his" referred to the musician whose music was currently playing.

Another example featured a large screen shot of a text conversation between two friends which mentioned a possible dinner date. With a tap of the Android phone's home button, the screen's bottom half immediately added review information for the restaurant in question as well as a tab that asked if the user wanted to set this date as an appointment.

The mission for Now on Tap, Chennapragada said, is to provide "more context, answers and actions" for the planet's next billion Android users.

She said context is provided by the more than 100 million places now logged into Google Now's database, while more than a billion possible answers exist to a range of questions.

Actions refers to the 100 current Android partners who will be working to anticipate users' needs based on context. For example, she said, "If you land at an airport, your Uber app will know that and ask you if you'd like to set up a ride."

But don't plan to take advantage of this development just yet. "We'll share more developments over the next few months," said Chennapragada.

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