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Google’s Pixel Buds won’t change the world
- dgritsko 9y ago> "However effective a gadget is, it will fail if it makes its user feel like a chump." Google Glass suffered from this problem too, IMO.
- ashraymalhotra 9y agoYup, same with Snapchat spectacles! Although Spectacles did try to play with the coolness factor at least.
- darkstar999 9y agoThe article agrees: > It is telling that this product comes from the same people who brought us Google Glass, an ugly, invasive face-mounted camera that evoked hostility wherever it was worn.
- Zak 9y agoI think the bigger problem with both is that they're tech demos rather than products. I got to demo Google Glass at a tech meetup once. It wasn't the first release, so there had been time to work bugs out. It rapidly overheated after taking, and looking at a couple pictures, and the battery life was abysmal. It demonstrated several capabilities that will probably be included in useful products in the future, but it was essentially unusable. I bet in a decade or so, smart glasses will take off. As soon as they're actually useful, the social resistance to them will get worn down.
- ashraymalhotra 9y agoThis is a really good observation. I ponder a lot on UX of new products and have to accept I didn’t think of this before. But I do expect Google to have realised this problem in their user testing (if it involved non techies at all). Pixel buds feels like a product rushed to market (because they had to remove the headphone jack?) and not well thought out/implemented.
- fredley 9y agoA very interesting observation about the shared public experience of both talking into a phone, vs. the semi-private experience of receiving one half of the conversation in your 'Buds. This echoes at least part of what made talking to people wearing Google Glass so odd - you didn't know what they could see, or where their mind was. In the same way having a conversation with someone while you glance at your phone is rude – because it creates an unevenness of attention – any interaction where you have a private component publicly and visibly involved is going to be awkward.
- reaperducer 9y agoI've read a lot of very critical reviews of Pixel Buds, but I'm not sure this rises to the level of "Silicon Valley Arrogance." But you know what does? - iPod headphones with wires that get brittle in the cold, so they pop out of your ears during a Chicago winter. - iPhones that go into emergency thermal shutdown from being in your pocket on a spring/summer day in Arizona. - An iMessage applet ecosystem that assumes that every iPhone user lives his life like a 20-year-old San Francisco metrosexual. (Launch day was Uber, OpenTable, and bill splitting. Yay.) How about Silicon Valley offer some apps and accessories for the 99.99999% of the world that doesn't live in your climate? Or doesn't live your lifestyle? Stop patting yourselves on the back for staring at your own bellybutton. (This isn't meant to be an Apple-specific rant; that's just the ecosystem I'm most familiar with.)
- vesrah 9y agoI live in Arizona and I can tell you that iPhones don't go into thermal shutdown while in your pocket. They will go into thermal shutdown if you leave them in the sun while you're outside working on a car on a >105* or so day, and even then they will start working once you get them out of the sun for a couple minutes.
- reaperducer 9y agoIt's happened to me in both Arizona and Nevada, just from being in my pocket while walking around at an outdoor public event. Take out the phone to take a pictures -- Nope. Warning message.
- darkstar999 9y agoNot to mention the headphone jack.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWeirdly enough, I feel like Google Maps and anything Yelp-like has the opposite problem in New York. When I search for something nearby, "two miles away" isn't remotely relevant when it's across the Hudson, in another state. They tried to build a single system that works for everyone, and it works kind of okay unless you're on the edge of a bell curve, geographically speaking.
- andrewgjohnson 9y agoDid anyone really thing Pixel Buds were going to be the must-have headphones for everyone? It was a cool example of applied technology that grabbed a bunch of headlines and gave people something to think about (what if I could talk to everyone regardless of language?) The slides in the office are there to get press; the earphones that are clearly not going to be a huge seller are there to get press.
- VikingCoder 9y ago"the translation service needs internet connectivity to work" I don't believe that's true. I think you can download a language set. Am I wrong?
- peterwwillis 9y agoGoogle doesn't do voice to text on the phone, they use an online service. It would take a ginormous corpus of trained data and cpu to quickly process most of the ways people pronounce even one language. Their conversational translation is voice based because typing back and forth on the phone takes too long. It works wonderfully when there is internet, but you're screwed if you're traveling without a data plan. Then you're forced to "learn a language" or "use hand signals" or "write things down" like some 20th century chump.
- chuckgreenman 9y agoThis seems like a bit of an over reaction. Google has to talk up Pixel Buds, they are a couple months behind apple's ear pods. Frankly I like the form factor better than the ear pods, because they actually look like headphones. I'm not sure the gestures are all that big of a deal, give it a couple more months and the software will become finer tuned and people will adjust.
- lucozade 9y agoSeem like a pretty good idea for when you want to listen to a translation. They're just not appropriate for conversations. Presumably the approach that the author has discovered is good for a conversation is still available?
- amelius 9y agoWhy does everything that Google designs look like it's made for pre-schoolers? Just type into Google images: "Google design" and "Apple design" and let yourself be shocked by the difference.
- joshuamorton 9y agoWhat, excluding the google doodles, appear to be made for preschoolers, and why? Apple's (industrial) design is, if I used just two words, flat and alien. Apple's UIs and product logos are more colorful, but their physical products are almost without fail white or brushed aluminum, and foreboding. Google uses color in its software, but if you take a look at google's physical products ("Google Home", "Google Pixel phone", etc.), you'll note that they're less colorful than their logos and software. Curious what makes you think "preschoolers"?
- dsl 9y agoIf you look at the design guidelines you see a stark difference in the starting point. Apple's [1] guidelines are basically "how to design your stuff to fit well with Apple". Google [2] on the other hand tried to create a visual language that was generic and understandable by people of all technical levels (with a focus on the "next billion users," people who are just getting their first computing device), and then open sourced it. 1. https://developer.apple.com/design/ https://developer.apple.com/design/ 2. https://material.io/ https://material.io/
- whywhywhywhy 9y agohttps://blog.prototypr.io/google-and-the-resurgence-of-italian-design-e9234cf3d073 https://blog.prototypr.io/google-and-the-resurgence-of-itali... this article might help you understand what they're trying to achieve
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI’m more interested if they will be profitable. If they arent maybe I can hack together something with this and failed Snapchat glasses.
- loriverkutya 9y agoAs a Douglas Adams fan, I'm slightly disturbed by the first sentence. "The dream of in-ear real-time translation goes back at least as far as Douglas Adams’s Babel Fish, a little alien that fits in a human ear, feeds on brain waves and, miraculously, excretes translations into the ear canal." However according to the Guide, the Babel Fish not really excretes anything into the ear canal. "It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them." It makes me always sad, when journalists don't do their homework.
- peeters 9y agoIt is kind of a UX curiosity. When people don't speak the same language, they are trained to have a third party "translator" to defer to. You speak, I watch you. Then I watch the translator. Then I speak, and so on. That translator could be a person, a phone running Translate, a notepad you're drawing pictures on, whatever. The point is, you have something physical acting as the intermediary and so it's natural to direct your attention to it. With the Pixel Buds, they're taking that physical manifestation away but the problem is under the hood nothing has changed. So you're still having this fragmented three-way conversation, but now there is no physical intermediary that makes it feel natural.
- chrisseaton 9y agoWhen you're trained to work with a translator, you're actually trained to not watch them - you keep eye contact with the other person the whole time and just listen to the translator, and it isn't a three-way conversation.
- peeters 9y agoGood point, and that's kind of where I'm coming from--when I said "people are trained" I meant implicitly, for regular people who would only encounter this rarely. So is this similarly just a question of user training to break from the "natural" interaction?
- cat199 9y agobut you still both know when the translator is speaking, and so to wait for the translation to finish, and can register facial expressions to gauge the effectiveness of the translated message in communicating what you are trying to say
- hummel 9y agoI really need someone to design a stand-alone pixelbud for hearing aids, speak translation. I really need it, and I'm willing to invest in anyone doing that.
- iliasku 9y agodoppler labs tried to do that and they 've shut down (https://hereplus.me/ https://hereplus.me/)
- workthrowaway27 9y agoFrom the article: "It is worse that Germans possess an inherent distrust of Silicon Valley firms so asking them to speak into a phone while you’re wearing earphones is an invitation for abuse." Is this true? I've never been to Germany and don't know many Germans, but this seems surprising to me.
- username223 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised: a lot of Germans used to be East Germans, and the Stasi were pretty thorough in their surveillance. EDIT: Watch "The Lives of Others" when you get a chance. It's a great movie about relating to the subject.
- danielam 9y ago"It is small contribution to the vast corpus of complaints about what happens to product design when an engineer’s focus on problem solving blinds them to the norms of social interaction." Product design is part of engineering. Good engineering entails solving the actual problem within the actual constraints. In this case, ignoring the constraints of social interaction is bad engineering.
- npsimons 9y ago> Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website. C-w
- rch 9y agoThese will be really useful for group conversations. I'd still use the phone for one-on-one interaction, but ear buds make perfect sense if you are mostly following along and only speaking occasionally.
- ineedasername 9y agoWell, probably they won't change the world. But the author's complaints sound like only that: complaining. Specifically, complaining in the vein of: but it's not PERFECT! or I prefer something else ::pouty face:: All of this from their own singular experience, where we are supposed to take their initial example, using a phone to translate with a taxi driver in China, as vastly superior. But we have only the author's POV for that: the taxi driver may have thought it just as ridiculous as the author feels the buds to be. Or maybe the driver loved it too, but that's the point: we don't know, and neither does the author, but the author is generalizing from these limited experiences to everything, and we're supposed to go along for the ride. This doesn't even get to the specifics: The crux is that the author dislikes that the translation is in-ear. There's other minor complaints, but that's the heart of his rant. A bit overblown: Translation at the UN itself is "in ear", where the members decide which of six official languages to listen to on their headphones. Not that we should hold up any single example as the ideal: We shouldn't. Different mechanisms may work best in different circumstances. That's the problem with this take-down of buds: It is sweeping and generalized, and supremely self-centered in its outlook for what all & everyone else should appreciate.
- calbear81 9y agoI think what would be helpful is some type of visual indicator on the buds (maybe a pulsing charging indicator) to express that the translation service is speaking so that the other party can see that you’re occupied with listening to the translation.
- exabrial 9y agoShould have included.... a headphone jack. A cheap feature that makes an otherwise incredible phone inaccessible to a large customer base.
- ashwinaj 9y agoSilicon valley arrogance? If you don't like it, rightly criticize it (with the caveat that it's your opinion or state facts) and don't use it. I don't understand the silicon valley bashing; if you are so smart why don't you build something better?
- gehwartzen 9y agoCan someone explain what the 'secret sauce' is in Pixel Buds that makes them unique? If the phone/internet is doing the translating why cant any earbuds/heaphones with a mic connected to the same phone with the same software do the same thing?
- khedoros1 9y agoMaybe they do something special with noise cancelling? I think it's mostly "We want to sell these, so we're only activating this feature if you use them."
- numbchuckskills 9y agoThis reads more like "Journalist Arrogance" Technology is evolutionary.
- 659087 9y agoThey will change the world, just not in the same way Google's PRopaganda team would have you believe. The main change will be that Google gets to record and analyze even more of the world's private interactions than they do now.