Learning to let go just. 7

A few years ago, my family and I were sitting in our living room and getting ready to watch the World Cup. I was fiddling around with my remote controller when my 3-year-old daughter, Ana Julia, turned to the Google Home and said, “Play the Mexico game in the living room!” The TV suddenly turned on and she just started watching. I was beaming with pride. I was so proud of my teams, both the one on the football field and the one at Google who made the experience possible. But most of all, I was proud of my little girl who, in the most matter of fact way, asked this piece of technology to do something in the same way she would’ve asked her father to. ⚽️

But then at the halftime break, she asked the Google Assistant to do something she knows I’d never do: “Play ‘Let it Go’ three times!” I was tempted to tell her it’s not going to work, because I knew how difficult it was to fulfill a multi-intent command. But to my amazement (and perhaps momentary annoyance), our Google Home actually played the song, three times in a row. 🥶

While the chorus blasted in the background (“let it go, let it go, let it gooooo!”), I couldn’t help but reflect on letting go. My team and I didn’t explicitly design or hardcode this feature; instead, we designed higher-order models that could parse different things people might ask for and fulfill them in one flow. In other words, we taught the Google Assistant the basic principles of conversation and trusted it to generalize for new and unexpected use cases. Obviously my daughter doesn’t understand how the technology works, but what she does understand is that she can use her voice to get technology to do things for her. 🙎🏽‍♀️

And we shouldn’t take this for granted. Our whole lives we’ve been using the most unnatural interfaces — from push-button telephones to computer mouses — to operate our technology. These machine-centric interaction models are now so deeply ingrained in us that, like me clutching my remote controller, it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t need to be this way. Technology is ready to start listening. We just need to have the courage to speak up. 🗣