The device taps into Assistant’s cloud-based smarts to let you enjoy music entertainment throughout your house, set alarms, manage shopping lists, ask what you want to know, manage smart home devices like Nest, more. ’s so confident in its natural language capabilities that Home doesn’t feature any buttons whatsoever; if you want to use it, you’ll need to talk to it. Home will offer several bases in custom colors (all the better to match your décor) when it launches this fall alongside Assistant. Beyond simple chatting, lo blends in Inbox’s Smart Replies feature to offer quick auto-response suggestions that you can blast off with a single tap, intelligently crafted based upon the messages you’ve received. (The image above shows some examples at the bottom of the app.) You can use it to chat with Assistant to perform tasks like making restaurant reservations, too. Duo, meanwhile, is a video calling app based around the bRTC QUIC web codecs. It monitors your network situation to work well even on shoddy connections. The most interesting part is Duo’s “Knock Knock” feature, which shows you a live video stream of the caller before you accept the connection. And by “interesting,” I mean “sounds like a flasher’s wet dream.” One cool tidbit: ’s holding a content to let the public vote on what the “N” in Android N sts for. Another cool tidbit: You can download the Android N Developer eview 3 right now to try out the new goodies yourself, including the lone blockbuster Android N reveal from I/O… Daydream’s composed of several parts. ’s baking “VR Mode” directly into Android N, with a notification system built for VR along with software tweaks to ensure sub-20-millisecond latency, which is crucial for avoiding nausea. Daydream also requires phones with potent processors displays with fast response times, so ’s introducing a new “Daydream-ready” certification for phones that meet those stards. Finally, Daydream moves beyond Cardboard with custom VR hardware, most notably a headset that presumably packs extra hardware like the GearVR, as well as a motion-sensing controller. ’s created reference designs of each that it’s sharing with hardware partners. Overall, Daydream’s hardware software design seems to largely rip off the Oculus Rift’s style. Developers will need to modularize their apps to work with the feature, however, which says can take less than a day of work. Once they do, support will be fairly widespread—instant apps will work with all Android phones running the older llybean OS on up. Intel AMD have nothing to fear, though. ’s T isn’t a competitor to traditional computer processors. Instead, it seems to be an application-specific integrated circuit—a hard-coded piece of hardware designed to do a specific task really, really well, as opposed to the overall versatility of Cs. ’s Ts are ASICs created to bolster the machine learning tasks underpinning so many of ’s various features services. Android Auto’s also wrapping in ze traffic navigation, in a “what the heck took so long?” move. ’s additionally adding support for AM/FM radio, HVAC, Bluetooth calling media streaming, multi-channel audio, digital instrument clusters in Android N’s Android Auto, open-sourcing the code so that car manufacturers can add even more. Check out our hs-on with the new Android Auto to see all the goodies in action. The Android ar 2.0 beta is out for developers now, with a consumer release targeted for some time later this year. went hs-on with Android ar 2.0 if you want to see it in action. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Android apps aren’t optimized for computer screens, a big part of the allure for Chromebooks is their simplicity. But it’ll be a thing, regardless.
