Google I/O 2016 introduced Google Assistant, the company’s next-generation conversational AI, and Google Home, a smart speaker product that would compete directly with the Amazon Echo. The Echo had been on the market for a year and a half by this point and had built enough momentum that the competitive response was overdue. What was interesting about Google’s announcement was that it framed the products as part of a longer-term strategy rather than as a direct response to a specific competitor.
The framing was that conversational AI would become a primary interface to computing over the years that followed, and that the company that built the best conversational layer would have a significant strategic position regardless of what specific hardware that conversation happened to flow through. Google Assistant would be available in Google Home, in Allo on phones, in Android more broadly through the year, and in third-party devices that integrated the technology.
The capability of Google Assistant at launch was somewhat better than Siri or Alexa for general factual questions, partly because of Google’s underlying knowledge graph and search infrastructure. The conversational handling was more sophisticated than the available competitors, though still limited. The natural language understanding was visibly the result of years of investment in machine learning that Google had been making for purposes beyond consumer voice products.
The Home device itself launched later in the year and would compete with the Echo on broadly comparable terms. The strategic case for Google to be in this market was about distribution and competitive positioning. If voice assistants were going to become a primary way people accessed information, Google could not afford to allow Amazon to own that interface. The advertising business depended on Google being the surface where information requests landed.
The other significant I/O 2016 announcement was Daydream, a virtual reality platform built into Android. The framing of Daydream was that mobile VR would be a consumer-accessible category in ways that high-end PC VR like the Oculus Rift would not be. The bet on mobile VR turned out to be partially correct. The category did exist, but it would not become the dominant form of VR over the years that followed. Standalone VR headsets running platforms more like Oculus would emerge as the more durable model.
The 2016 I/O announcements collectively reflected a Google that was making large bets across multiple emerging categories. The bets were not all going to pay off. The willingness to make multiple bets simultaneously was the strategic posture that I/O 2016 most clearly conveyed.