Eric Schmidt: preference

Transcript context

…Right now, there are various devices you can speak to, such as Alexa, and it will play a song for you or buy something for you on Amazon. Just in your mental wish list — something that doesn’t exist now — if there were a function where you could speak to a device, and the device would perform that function for you, what would it be? What do you want that you can’t get right now, as a consumer? Well, if you look at the current generation of devices, what I really want is the Google Assistant to work at scale, which means that I want an assistant that I can talk to that talks back, that is like a human assistant and brilliant, that knows everything. As an economist, you might want to talk to your assistant and ask them theoretical questions of economics. I can imagine lots of things I would like to ask. Today, sitting there and saying to your Alexa or Google Home, please turn off the lights, strikes me as kind of a low level question. There must be some much more sophisticated things we can do. Many people believe that we can get to the point where you can have incredibly intelligent assistants that are on these devices, and that much of the interface will be verbal, not text. I look at you all’s generation, and people . . . I carry my computer around all day, which I’m very happy about. I used to have a computer that was immense, now I have a tiny computer. From your perspective, a smartphone is your computer, and you would prefer to just talk to it. And I think the technology is finally there to be able to do that. There have been many accomplishments that have surprised me. The quality of image recognition and voice recognition that we have today, I thought would be unachievable in my lifetime. Those are phenomenal gains. I want something that will answer the doorbell for me. Now, in all of these discussions, there’s a segment in the middle called overrated versus underrated. I’ll toss out some ideas or things, and you tell me what you think of them, if they’re overrated or underrated. Of course, feel free to pass on any of them. Our first one, Antarctica. [laughter]…

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