It sure looks like Android 15 is going to have lock screen widgets. The Android 14 QPR2 beta landed the other day, and Mishaal Rahman over at Android Authority found a hidden unfinished feature that brings back lock screen widgets. We’ve expected this to happen since Apple’s big lock screen widget release with iOS 16.
Rahman found a new “communal” space feature that resembles lock screen widgets. After enabling the feature and swiping in from the right of the lock screen, a pencil icon will pop up. Tapping the icon opens up a widget list, allowing you to move some widgets to the lock screen. Right now, in this unfinished state, the default lock screen clock and notification panel UI don’t know how to get out of the way yet, so you get a pile of widgets with the usual lock screen UI on top. It’s a mess.
Any time one smartphone operating system does something, the other tends to copy it, and iOS added lock screen widgets in 2022. Two years later is plenty of time for Google to adjust and copy the feature. The thing is, Android added lock screen widgets in 2012 with Android 4.2. Google removed the feature two years later in Android 5.0, so really, this is Android copying iOS copying Android. Some of this code is apparently making a comeback, as all the widgets available to the lock screen were ones that still had the 10-year-old “keyguard” flag set for Android 4.2.
The widget lock screen has strangely been named the “communal” space, and Rahman speculates this might be because this particular UI experiment was meant for tablets in a dock mode. “Communal” would mean that everyone in your house could see them, and maybe it would be good to limit the amount of personal data displayed without needing to pass the lock screen. This is just one of the feature experiments that happened to slip out the door, though, and it’s hard to imagine Google not letting phones do this, too, when iOS already does it.
Enlarge/ The Big Tech groups are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI
FT
The world’s biggest cloud computing companies that have pushed new artificial intelligence tools to their business customers are offering only limited protections against potential copyright lawsuits over the technology.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to offer new services such as virtual assistants and chatbots as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on generative AI—systems that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.
AI models are “trained” on data, such as photographs and text found on the internet. This has led to concern that rights holders, from media companies to image libraries, will make legal claims against third parties who use the AI tools trained on their copyrighted data.
The big three cloud computing providers have pledged to defend business customers from such intellectual property claims. But an analysis of the indemnity clauses published by the cloud computing companies show that the legal protections only extend to the use of models developed by or with oversight from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
“The indemnities are quite a smart bit of business . . . and make people think ‘I can use this without worrying’,” said Matthew Sag, professor of law at Emory University.
But Brenda Leong, a partner at Luminos Law, said it was “important for companies to understand that [the indemnities] are very narrowly focused and defined.”
Google, Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment.
The indemnities provided to customers do not cover use of third-party models, such as those developed by AI start-up Anthropic, which counts Amazon and Google as investors, even if these tools are available for use on the cloud companies’ platforms.
In the case of Amazon, only content produced by its own models, such as Titan, as well as a range of the company’s AI applications, are covered.
Similarly, Microsoft only provides protection for the use of tools that run on its in-house models and those developed by OpenAI, the startup with which it has a multibillion-dollar alliance.
“People needed those assurances to buy, because they were hyper aware of [the legal] risk,” said one IP lawyer working on the issues.
The three cloud providers, meanwhile, have been adding safety filters to their tools that aim to screen out any potentially problematic content that is generated. The tech groups had become “more satisfied that instances of infringements would be very low,” but did not want to provide “unbounded” protection, the lawyer said.
While the indemnification policies announced by Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are similar, their customers may want to negotiate more specific indemnities in contracts tailored to their needs, though that is not yet common practice, people close to the cloud companies said.
OpenAI and Meta are among the companies fighting the first generative AI test cases brought by prominent authors and the comedian Sarah Silverman. They have focused in large part on allegations that the companies developing models unlawfully used copyrighted content to train them.
Indemnities were being offered as an added layer of “security” to users who might be worried about the prospect of more lawsuits, especially since the test cases could “take significant time to resolve,” which created a period of “uncertainty,” said Angela Dunning, a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb.
However, Google’s indemnity does not extend to models that have been “fine-tuned” by customers using their internal company data—a practice that allows businesses to train general models to produce more relevant and specific results—while Microsoft’s does.
Amazon’s covers Titan models that have been customized in this way, but if the alleged infringement is due to the fine-tuning, the protection is voided.
Legal claims brought against the users—rather than the makers—of generative AI tools may be challenging to win, however.
When dismissing part of a claim brought by three artists a year ago against AI companies Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, US Judge William Orrick said one “problem” was that it was “not plausible” that every image generated by the tools had relied on “copyrighted training images.”
For copyright infringement to apply, the AI-generated images must be shown to be “substantially similar” to the copyrighted images, Orrick said.
Hey Android users, are you tired of Google’s neglect of Google Assistant? Well, one of Google’s biggest rivals, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is apparently coming for the premium phone space occupied by Google’s voice assistant. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority found that the ChatGPT app is working on support for Android’s voice assistant APIs and a system-wide overlay UI. If the company rolls out this feature, users could set the ChatGPT app as the system-wide assistant app, allowing it to pop up anywhere in Android and respond to user questions. ChatGPT started as a text-only generative AI but received voice and image input capabilities in September.
Usually, it’s the Google Assistant with system-wide availability in Android, but that’s not special home cooking from Google—it all happens via public APIs that technically any app can plug into. You can only have one app enabled as the system-wide “Default Assistant App,” and beyond the initial setting, the user always has to change it manually. The assistant APIs are designed to be powerful, keeping some parts of the app running 24/7 no matter where you are. Being the default Assistant app enables launching the app via the power button or a gesture, and the assist app can read the current screen text and images for processing.
If some Android manufacturer signed a deal with ChatGPT and included it as a bundled system application, ChatGPT could even use an always-on voice hotword, where saying something like “Hey, ChatGPT” would launch the app even when the screen is off. System apps get more permissions than normal apps, though, and an always-on hotword is locked behind these system app permissions, so ChatGPT would need to sign a distribution deal with some Android manufacturer. Given the red-hot popularity of ChatGPT, though, I’m sure a few would sign up if it were offered.
Rahman found that ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, included a new activity named “com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity.” He managed to turn on the normally disabled feature that revealed ChatGPT’s new overlay API. This is the usual semi-transparent spinning orb UI that voice assistants use, although Rahman couldn’t get it to respond to a voice command just yet. This is all half-broken and under development, so it might never see a final release, but companies usually release the features they’re working on.
Of course, the problem with any of these third-party voice assistant apps as a Google Assistant replacement is that they don’t run a serious app ecosystem. As with Bixby and Alexa, there are no good apps to host your notes, reminders, calendar entries, shopping list items, or any other input-based functions you might want to do. As a replacement for Google Search, though, where you ask it a question and get an answer, it would probably be a decent alternative.
Google has neglected Google Assistant for years, but with the rise of generative AI, it’s working on revamping Assistant with some Google Bard smarts. It’s also reportedly working on a different assistant, “Pixie,” which would apparently launch with the Pixel 9, but that will be near the end of 2024.
There’s currently a surge in cryptocurrency and phishing scams proliferating on X (formerly Twitter)—hiding under the guise of gold and gray checkmarks intended to mark “Verified Organizations,” reports have warned this week.
These scams seem to mostly commandeer dormant X accounts purchased online through dark web marketplaces, according to a whitepaper released by the digital threat monitoring platform CloudSEK. But the scams have also targeted high-profile X users who claim that they had enhanced security measures in place to protect against these hacks.
This suggests that X scammers are growing more sophisticated at a time when X has launched an effort to sell even more gold checks at lower prices through a basic tier announced this week.
Most recently, the cyber threat intelligence company Mandiant—which is a subsidiary of Google—confirmed its X account was hijacked despite enabling two-factor authentication. According to Bleeping Computer, the hackers used Mandiant’s account to “distribute a fake airdrop that emptied cryptocurrency wallets.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on how many users may have been scammed, but Mandiant is investigating and promised to share results when its probe concludes.
In September, a similar fate befell Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who had his account hijacked by hackers. The bad actors posted a fake offer for free non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a link to a fake website designed to empty cryptocurrency wallets. The post was only up for about 20 minutes but drained $691,000 in digital assets from Buterin’s unsuspecting followers, according to CloudSEK’s research.
Another group monitoring cryptocurrency and phishing scams linked to X accounts is MalwareHunterTeam (MHT), Bleeping Computer reported. This week, MHT has flagged additional scams targeting politicians’ accounts, including a Canadian senator, Amina Gerba, and a Brazilian politician, Ubiratan Sanderson.
On X, gold ticks are supposed to reassure users that an account can be trusted by designating that an account is affiliated with an official organization or company. Gray ticks signify an account is linked to government organizations. CloudSEK estimated that hijacked gold and gray checks could be sold online for between $1,200 to $2,000, depending on how old the account is or how many followers it has. Bad actors can also buy accounts affiliated with gold accounts for $500 each.
A CloudSEK spokesperson told Ars that its team is “in the process of reporting the matter” to X.
X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.
CloudSEK predicted that scams involving gold checks would continue to be a problem so long as selling gold and gray checks remains profitable.
“It is evident that threat actors would not budge from such profit-making businesses anytime soon,” CloudSEK’s whitepaper said.
For organizations seeking to avoid being targeted by hackers on X, CloudSEK recommends strengthening brand monitoring on the platform, enhancing security settings, and closing out any dormant accounts. It’s also wise for organizations to cease storing passwords in a browser, and instead use a password manager that’s less vulnerable to malware attacks, CloudSEK said. Organizations on X may also want to monitor activity on any apps that become connected to X, Bleeping Computer advised.
Google-owned security firm Mandiant spent several hours trying to regain control of its account on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday after an unknown scammer hijacked it and used it to spread a link that attempted to steal cryptocurrency from people who clicked on it.
“We are aware of the incident impacting the Mandiant X account and are working to resolve the issue,” company officials wrote in a statement. “We’ve since regained control over the account and are currently working on restoring it.” The statement didn’t answer questions asking if the company had determined how the account was compromised.
The hacked Mandiant account was initially used to masquerade as one belonging to Phantom, a company that offers a wallet for storing cryptocurrency. Posts on X encouraged people to visit a malicious website to see if their wallet was one of 250,000 that were eligible for an award of tokens. Over several hours, X employees played tug-of-war with the unknown scammer, with scam posts being removed only to reappear, according to people who followed the events.
Mandiant profile page claiming to be affiliated with “friendly crypto wallet” Phantom.
One of the scam posts spread by the hijacked Mandiant account.
Eventually, the scammer changed the @mandiant username and reappeared under a new username. After using the account to promote a fake website impersonating Phantom and promising free tokens, it posted the cryptic message: “check bookmarks when you get account back.” It also chided Mandiant to “change password please.”
Post saying “change password please”
Post saying to check bookmarks
At the time this post went live on Ars, the Mandiant profile displayed the message “This account doesn’t exist.”
Mandiant is one of the leading security companies and best known for helping clients investigate and recover from major network compromises. That vantage point gives it major insights into threat actors, many of them backed by nation-states, and the often previously unknown tactics, techniques, and procedures they use to compromise the security of some of the world’s most powerful and well-resourced organizations. Google purchased Mandiant in 2022 for $5.4 billion, which, at the time, was its second-biggest acquisition ever.
Many questions remain about Mandiant’s measures to secure its X account. Among them: Was it protected by a strong password and any form of two-factor authentication? Last month, someone claimed to have discovered the social media site was vulnerable to a “reflected XSS,” a type of vulnerability that can sometimes be used to compromise the security of accounts when a legitimate user currently logged in clicks on a malicious link in a different browser tab. The user said they reported the vulnerability through legitimate channels but that the submission didn’t qualify under the X bug bounty program.
“Clicking a crafted link or going to some crafted web pages would allow attackers to take over your account (posting, liking, updating your profile, deleting your account, etc.),” Chaofan Shou, a University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. candidate, wrote last month.
Enlarge/ December 12 post by UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Chaofan Shou.
Attempts to reach Phantom for comment were unsuccessful.
Google has indicated that it is ready to settle a class-action lawsuitfiled in 2020 over its Chrome browser’s Incognito mode. Arising in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit accused Google of continuing to “track, collect, and identify [users’] browsing data in real time” even when they had opened a new Incognito window.
The lawsuit, filed by Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen, accused Google of violating wiretap laws. It also alleged that sites using Google Analytics or Ad Manager collected information from browsers in Incognito mode, including web page content, device data, and IP address. The plaintiffs also accused Google of taking Chrome users’ private browsing activity and then associating it with their already-existing user profiles.
Google initially attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed by pointing to the message displayed when users turned on Chrome’s incognito mode. That warning tells users that their activity “might still be visible to websites you visit.”
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Google’s bid for summary judgement in August, pointing out that Google never revealed to its users that data collection continued even while surfing in Incognito mode.
“Google’s motion hinges on the idea that plaintiffs consented to Google collecting their data while they were browsing in private mode,” Rogers ruled. “Because Google never explicitly told users that it does so, the Court cannot find as a matter of law that users explicitly consented to the at-issue data collection.”
According to the notice filed on Tuesday, Google and the plaintiffs have agreed to terms that will result in the litigation being dismissed. The agreement will be presented to the court by the end of January, with the court giving final approval by the end of February.
Enlarge/ A string of deals by Microsoft, Google and Amazon amounted to two-thirds of the $27 billion raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023,
FT montage/Dreamstime
Big tech companies have vastly outspent venture capital groups with investments in generative AI startups this year, as established giants use their financial muscle to dominate the much-hyped sector.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon last year struck a series of blockbuster deals, amounting to two-thirds of the $27 billion raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023, according to new data from private market researchers PitchBook.
The huge outlay, which exploded after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, highlights how the biggest Silicon Valley groups are crowding out traditional tech investors for the biggest deals in the industry.
The rise of generative AI—systems capable of producing humanlike video, text, image and audio in seconds—have also attracted top Silicon Valley investors. But VCs have been outmatched, having been forced to slow down their spending as they adjust to higher interest rates and falling valuations for their portfolio companies.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen the market quickly consolidate around a handful of foundation models, with large tech players coming in and pouring billions of dollars into companies like OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic and Mistral,” said Nina Achadjian, a partner at US venture firm Index Ventures referring to some of the top AI startups.
“For traditional VCs, you had to be in early and you had to have conviction—which meant being in the know on the latest AI research and knowing which teams were spinning out of Google DeepMind, Meta and others,” she added.
Financial Times
A string of deals, such as Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI as well as billions of dollars raised by San Francisco-based Anthropic from both Google and Amazon, helped push overall spending on AI groups to nearly three times as much as the previous record of $11 billion set two years ago.
Venture investing in tech hit record levels in 2021, as investors took advantage of ultra-low interest rates to raise and deploy vast sums across a range of industries, particularly those most disrupted by Covid-19.
Microsoft has also committed $1.3 billion to Inflection, another generative AI start-up, as it looks to steal a march on rivals such as Google and Amazon.
Building and training generative AI tools is an intensive process, requiring immense computing power and cash. As a result, start-ups have preferred to partner with Big Tech companies which can provide cloud infrastructure and access to the most powerful chips as well as dollars.
That has rapidly pushed up the valuations of private start-ups in the space, making it harder for VCs to bet on the companies at the forefront of the technology. An employee stock sale at OpenAI is seeking to value the company at $86 billion, almost treble the valuation it received earlier this year.
“Even the world’s top venture investors, with tens of billions under management, can’t compete to keep these AI companies independent and create new challengers that unseat the Big Tech incumbents,” said Patrick Murphy, founding partner at Tapestry VC, an early-stage venture capital firm.
“In this AI platform shift, most of the potentially one-in-a-million companies to appear so far have been captured by the Big Tech incumbents already.”
VCs are not absent from the market, however. Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner’s New York-based firm, is the lead investor in OpenAI’s employee stock sale, having already backed the company earlier this year. Thrive has continued to invest throughout a downturn in venture spending in 2023.
Paris-based Mistral raised around $500 million from investors including venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, and chipmaker Nvidia since it was founded in May this year.
Some VCs are seeking to invest in companies building applications that are being built over so-called “foundation models” developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, in much the same way apps began being developed on mobile devices in the years after smartphones were introduced.
“There is this myth that only the foundation model companies matter,” said Sarah Guo, founder of AI-focused venture firm Conviction. “There is a huge space of still-unexplored application domains for AI, and a lot of the most valuable AI companies will be fundamentally new.”
Google is wrapping its head around the idea of being a generative AI company. The “code red” called in response to ChatGPT has had Googlers scrambling to come up with AI features and ideas. Once all the dust settles on that work, Google might turn inward and try to “optimize” the company with some of its new AI capabilities. With artificial intelligence being the hot new thing, how much of Google’s, uh, natural intelligence needs to be there?
A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people’s jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to “consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers.” According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google’s new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.
Google announced a “new era of AI-powered ads” in May, featuring a “natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jump-start campaign creation and simplify Search ads.” Google said its new AI could scan your website and “generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets,” making the Google Ads chatbot one part designer and one part sales expert.
One ad tool, Google’s Performance Max (or “PMax” for short), got a generative AI boost after May’s announcement and can now “create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks.” First, it helps advertisers decide if an ad should be in places like YouTube, Search, Discover, Gmail, Maps, or banner ads on third-party sites. Then, it can just make the ad content, thanks to generative AI that can scan your website for material. (A human advertiser is still in the loop approving content—for now.) It’s called “Performance Max” because variations of your ad are still left up to the machines, which can constantly remix your ads in real time using click-through rates as feedback. Google’s official description is that “Assets are automatically mixed and matched to find the top performing combinations based on which Google Ads channel your ad is appearing on.”
Changing ads on the fly with immediate click-through-rate validation and A/B testing is a task that no person would have the time to do. Also, no one would want to pay a human to do this much work, so having an AI monitor your ad performance sounds like a smart solution. The report also notes another benefit of making AI do this work: “Because these tools don’t require much employee attention, they carry relatively few expenses, so the ad revenue carries a high-profit margin.”
The Information report says, “A growing number of advertisers have adopted PMax since [launch], eliminating the need for some employees who specialized in selling ads for a particular Google service, like search, working together to design ad campaigns for big customers.”
According to the report, as of a year ago, Google had about 13,500 people devoted to this kind of sales work, a huge chunk of the 30,000-strong ad division. These 13,500 people aren’t necessarily all going to be affected, and those who are won’t necessarily be laid off—they could be reassigned to other areas in Google. We should know the scale of Google Ad’s big re-org soon. The report says, “Some employees expect the changes to be announced next month.”
One of the neatest features of the Play Store is remote app installation. If you have multiple devices signed in to the same Google account, the Play Store’s “install” button will let you pick any of those devices as an installation target. If you find an app you like, it’s great to queue up installs on your phone, watch, TV, tablet, laptop, and car, all from a single device. It makes sense, then, that you might want to be able to uninstall apps from all your devices, too.
The new feature coming to the Play Store will let you do exactly that: remote uninstalls from any device on your account. The first sign of the feature is in the latest Android patch notes, which list a “New feature to help you uninstall apps on connected devices.” It doesn’t seem like this has been activated yet, but news site TheSpAndroid has photos of the feature, showing what you would expect. Opening the Play Store and uninstalling an app will bring up a list of devices, just like installing does now.
After hitting the “uninstall” button, this list of devices will pop up.
TheSpAndroid
It might not look like it, but under the hood, all installs from the Play Store happen via Android’s push notification system. By default, the press of the Play Store install button requests Google to send an app push to your current device, but there’s no need for the target device of a remote app install to be turned on and unlocked. Just like any other push notification, when the device connects to the Internet and sees the push, it will wake up and do whatever business it needs to do—usually, that’s “show a message and beep,” but in this case, that business is “install an app.” Google has slowly exposed its remote install functionality to the world, first with the Android Market (now Play Store) website in 2011. It took 11 years for a similar feature to come to the Play Store phone app.
Uninstalls can also work via the push notification system. Today’s news marks the first time this feature has been exposed to users, but remote uninstalls have been around for as long as remote installs. Google can trigger the remote uninstall feature without user consent, and it occasionally uses this feature to remotely mass-uninstall malware from all Play Store devices. Users are finally getting a button to do this themselves.
Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google’s cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn’t enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.
As a cloud-based gaming service, Stadia had all the game code run on remote servers, with individual video frames streaming live to the user and showing the gameplay. The user would press buttons on their local controller, and every single individual button press had to travel across the Internet to the remote game server to be processed. These services live and die by their latency; in an attempt to reduce latency, the Stadia Controller connected to the Internet directly over Wi-Fi instead of connecting via Bluetooth to your computer and then to the Internet. Google claimed that one less hop on the local network led to shorter latency, especially since the service was originally built around the power-limited Chromecast dongle.
Enlarge/ The official Stadia Controller in “clearly white.”
Google
With the service dead, the Wi-Fi-only controller wouldn’t work wirelessly, leaving old-school USB as the only way to use the controller. However, Stadia Controllers already came with a dormant Bluetooth chip, so Google cooked up a way to convert the orphaned controllers from Wi-Fi communication to Bluetooth, allowing them to wirelessly connect to computers and phones as a generic HID (Human Interface Device). Normally you’d expect a download for some kind of firmware update program, but Google being Google, the Stadia Controller update process happens entirely on a webpage. Google’s controller update page has a very fancy “WebUSB” API setup—you fire up a Chromium browser, plug in your controller, grant the browser access to the device, and the webpage can access the controller directly and update the firmware, without any program to install.
While the web-based updater is very neat, it also means it’s impossible for a third party to archive the updater for future use. Once Google’s website goes down, there are no more controller updates. A desktop app, on the other hand, could be kept around and re-distributed forever.
The early days reports of Stadia sales said the service undershot Google’s estimates by “hundreds of thousands” of users, so there are probably a lot of controllers out there. Even in 2022, it was normal to buy new Stadia Controllers labeled with the original 2019 manufacturing date, giving the impression that these things were just filling up warehouses. With the update plan still running for another year, there’s more time for sales to happen and for these controllers to find a good home.
In our review of the Stadia service, Ars’ Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland found the controller was “one of the highlights of the Stadia launch package,” saying it “boasts a solid, well-balanced weight; comfortable, clicky face buttons and analog sticks; quality ergonomic design on the D-pad and shoulder triggers; and strong, distinct rumble motors.” So, assuming you can get the $70 MSRP device at a significant discount, it sounds like a decent buy. The one downside is that audio features like the headphone jack and microphone won’t work after the Bluetooth update.
Move over Google Assistant, Google is apparently working on a new AI. The Information reports that Google is working on a new “Pixie” AI assistant that will be exclusive to Pixel devices. Pixie will reportedly be powered by Google’s new “Gemini” AI model. The report says Pixie would launch first on the Pixel 9: “Eventually, Google wants to bring the features to its lower-end phones and devices like its watch.”
So far, Google and Amazon reportedly have plans to reboot their voice assistants with the new wave of large language models. Both are only at the rumor stage, so neither company has promoted how a large language model will help a voice assistant. Today, the typical complaints are usually around voice recognition accuracy and response time, which a language model doesn’t seem like it would help with. Presumably, large language models would help allow longer-form, more in-depth responses to questions, but whether consumers want to hear a synthetic robot voice read out a paragraph-long response is something the market will figure out.
Another feature listed in the report is that Google might build “glasses that could make use of the AI’s ability to recognize the objects a wearer is seeing.” Between Google Glass and Project Iris, Google has started and stopped a lot of eyewear projects.
The move shows how Google has changed its thinking around AI assistants over the past decade. It used to view Google Assistant as the future of Google Search, so it wanted Assistant to be available everywhere. Google Assistant was a good product for a time, available on all Android phones, on iOS via the Google app, and via lots of purpose-built hardware like the Google Home/Nest Audio speakers and smart displays. Google Assistant never made any money, though. The hardware was all sold at cost, the software was given away to partners, and the ongoing costs of voice processing piled up. There was never any additional revenue to pay for the Google Assistant in the form of ads. Amazon is in the same boat with its Alexa: No one has figured out how to make voice assistants profitable.
Since Google Assistant is a money pit, The Information previously reported that Google plans to “invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google, including TVs, headphones, smart-home speakers, smart glasses and smartwatches that use Google’s Wear.” The idea is for Google to double down on its own hardware, which, according to the previous report, is what Google thinks will provide the best protection against regulators threatening the company’s search deals on the iPhone and Android partner devices. “We’re going to take on the iPhone” is apparently the hard-to-believe mindset at Google right now, according to this report.
Making the next-gen Assistant exclusive to the Pixel 9 would fall into this category. Presumably, the ongoing money problem would then be solved, or at least accounted for, in the sales of phone hardware. The current Google Assistant was originally exclusive to the first Pixel and spread out to Google’s partners, but The Information’s reporting makes it seem like that isn’t the plan this time (though that could always change). No one knows what will happen to Google AI assistant No. 1 (Google Assistant) when AI assistant No. 2 launches, but killing it off sounds like a likely outcome. It would also be a way to cut costs and get Google Assistant off people’s devices.
The problem with doubling down on hardware is that Google Hardware is a small division that has previously been unable to support this kind of ambition. Going back to that quote about third-party devices, there are no Google cars, TVs, or smart glasses (the report says smart glasses are being worked on, though). Some years, Google’s existing hardware isn’t necessarily very good. In other years, long times will go by when Google doesn’t update some product lines, leaving them for dead (laptops, tablets). Google Hardware is also usually only available in about 13 countries, which is a tiny sliver of the world. Being on third-party devices protects you from all this. Previously, Google’s strength was the availability of its ecosystem, and you give that up if you make everything exclusive to your hardware.
Chrome has finally announced plans to kill third-party cookies. It’s been almost four years since third-party cookies have been disabled in Firefox and Safari, but Google, one of the world’s largest ad companies, has been slow-rolling the death of the tracking cookie. Ad companies use third-party cookies to track users across the web, and that web activity is used to show users relevant ads. Now that Google’s alternative user-tracking ad system, the “Privacy Sandbox,” has launched in Chrome, it’s finally ready to do away with the previous form of ad tracking. The new timeline to kill third-party cookies is the second half of 2024.
Google’s blog post calls the rollout “Tracking Protection” and says the first tests will begin on January 4, where 1 percent of Chrome users will get the feature. By the second half of 2024, the rollout should hit everyone on desktop Chrome and Android (Chrome on iOS is just a reskinned Safari and is not applicable). The rollout comes with some new UI bits for Chrome, with Google saying, “If a site doesn’t work without third-party cookies and Chrome notices you’re having issues—like if you refresh a page multiple times—we’ll prompt you with an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that website from the eye icon on the right side of your address bar.” Since other browsers have been doing this for four years, it’s hard to imagine many web admins not being ready for it.
Enlarge/ Chrome’s new third-party cookies controls.
Google
Google says the rollout is “subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.” Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox switch represents the world’s most popular browser (Google Chrome) integrating with the web’s biggest advertising platform (Google Ads) and shutting down alternative tracking methods used by competing ad companies. So, some regulators are naturally interested in the whole process.
Google says its choice to offer this privacy feature four years after its competitors is a “responsible approach” to phasing out third-party cookies. That responsibility seems to primarily be about responsibility to Google’s shareholders since turning off tracking cookies was previously seen as an attack on Google’s business model. Google’s position as the world’s biggest browser vendor allowed it to delay the death of tracking cookies long enough to create an alternative tracking system, which launched earlier this year in Chrome. With the ad business secured, it’s now acceptable to phase out cookies. So far, everything is going to plan.
