If Google wants to take over my world, let them. The Google team is on tour with its Google House, a dreamy McMansion inspiring drools, even from luddites. The house, with its themed rooms, demonstrates how, with just a few simple, inter-woven Google apps, our lives can be more efficient.
We start in the living room, where Chromecast, a small, key-shaped dongle fits into the back of the TV to sync all devices, providing access to music, videos, photos, movies and services like Netflix and Hulu on the big screen. The best part? It’s portability. With Chromecast, as long as you’ve got the dongle, you can take all your movies and your streaming on the road, with your device as the remote.
The Google app is being pushed hard, and it’s easy to see why. It comes with Google Voice, a Siri-style button the Google folks are quick to point out through an actual demo, operates at a fraction of the speed of Apple’s go-fetch wench. So, while we’re sitting around the television, watching music videos, we can ask G-Voice what song it is, and all sorts of trivia questions. Essential? Not exactly, but it gets better.
For example, using maps, the app instinctively knows my home address (and stores previous searches), connecting with my calendar to plan my route to a meeting, either by public transport, car, on foot, or on cycle.
It goes a step further, telling me what time I have to leave to be on time, depending on road works or transport delays. And, if all that fails, I can use G-voice to command my virtual assistant to send an email saying I’ll be late.
Let’s say I’ve got an hour in between meetings; I can use “explore” in the maps app to check out local shopping, eating, and drinking. The Field Trip app reveals little gems, like historical points of interest.
I can also use G-voice to ask where the nearest supermarket is (and I can be specific), as well as their hours.
Sticking to the food front, we enter the kitchen, where the guys behind Sorted, the most subscribed cooking site on YouTube, are demonstrating how to use G-voice to pull up recipes, quantity conversions and nutritional information.
It’s sophisticated enough to handle commands like, “compare olive oil and butter,” bringing up profiles for each, side by side. If you’ve run out of an ingredient, use G-voice again, to “remind me to buy cumin when I’m at my local supermarket.”
Some of the usage is fairly obvious, and simply offers a shortcut using voice over typing, but the Translate app, in particular, has real functionality. G-voice can pull up information about a destination, a currency converter and restaurant suggestions. Google translate works offline and on.
Download favorite phrases or the entire book to use without a connection. With a wifi connection, the app translates live, acting as an interpreter with no lag time. Speak into the device, and the translation is read out, or take a picture of the menu, and highlight text, or handwriting to translate.
Take all those vacation pictures and instantly upload them with the G+ app, to enhance them, and use “auto awesome” to create a panoramic image. It can also combine several pictures to ensure everyone is smiling in the same photo. Tap “Action” and multiple shots are condensed into one blurred shot. “auto awesome movies” lets you make and share simple videos, setting them to license-free music.
Google is going after the Apple market in its synergistic approach to apps, as well as the lightweight, and sturdy Chromebook and its Nexus 7 tablet, smaller than the iPad mini 2. Google may lack the visual design aesthetic, but as a user, it’s got real appeal for its simple, instinctive, and practical usage. If Google is the here and now as well as the future, I’m in.
